alt Hacker NewsWhite Rabbit – sub-nanosecond synchronization for large distributed systems
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Haven't looked into this in depth but sub-nanosecond sync for systems up to 10km apart is interesting since 10km is about 33 light microseconds. There is some trickery going on.
Some may find https://gitlab.com/ohwr/project/white-rabbit/-/wikis/home an easier starting point. Particularly the "Synchronization" page.
In short, it's about giving PTP and SyncE some extra smarts.
If this wasn't CERN tech I would think I was being taken for a ride. Conventional wisdom is that distributed consensus is not possible at this kind of performance, does anyone have a sense for how this is different and how my mental model is wrong?
Haven't dug in on the technicals, but this is coming out of CERN, it looks like - and in that light, the links to "We're hiring" on that page almost feel like a flex...
What is significance of this?
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If you run "make" in the papers/IBIC2013 directory you'll get this paper: https://cds.cern.ch/record/1743073/files/thbl2.pdf
It's quite interesting - this isn't ethernet as we know it. Instead of each NIC using its own free-running clock, all the physical layers are sync'ed to each other at layer 1. (note that gigabit ethernet, which is what it uses, sends data at all times - when idle it sends the idle symbol)