in my hand right now is an atomic clock
like the real kind with rubidium inside and installing it promises to make your
computer 100 times faster that is if your
computer happens to be a massive data center but seriously though
without a data center we've got it working here in our lab and based on
what we've seen this could be the biggest Leap Forward in Computing this
decade it doesn't sound like the biggest deal on the surface you know nanosecond
accurate time synchronized between every computer on a network so what right but
so much Computing over head goes into compensating for Signal delays that this
could do everything from improving the efficiency of live video broadcasts to
dramatically reducing in-game latency to enhancing online security and the
craziest thing is that almost every device from this computer to my phone
already has the necessary Hardware to implement it all they need is an
accurate pulse from a card like this one and they're Off to the Races and we're
going to show you guys how it works and we're going to tell you about our
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highly precise timing is a pretty mature technology at this point and it's
already being used in a number of critical applications like power
stations where a mismatch between the AC output and the phase of the electrical
grid could cause a big fire or broadcasting where all the cameras need
to be synced up on the Jumbotron to avoid tearing or for scientific research
like at the Large Hadron Collider or our friends over at ligo what is new about
it is the affordability now at sixteen
hundred dollars most Gamers would probably choose an RTX 3090 or really
almost anything else but in the data center that is chump change and it's a
fraction of what these Solutions used to cost so here's our setup to show you
guys why this is important and just how good this technology is inside this Nook
9 extreme is a Rubidium atomic clock which synchronizes to G PS time
periodically using this antenna oh this
one not that it really needs to given that a
clock like this should drift about one second every 100 million years and then
over here this is another computer now
in the course of communicating with our first computer this one would normally
attach timestamps to every data packet to ensure that they are processed and
responded to in the correct order but we've got a big problem you see these
two computers and probably the one you're using right now are synchronized
using the network time protocol or ntp and ntp was awesome back when it was
created by David Mills back in the 1980s but to say that computers have gotten a
little faster and the internet has expanded since then would be a gross
understatement so look at this we've set each one of
our computers to Output a timing pulse every second you can see right here
there pretty close within a few milliseconds of true time oh the blue
one came unplugged hello oh God it broke a piece off of it is it
alive please tell me we get signal main screen turn on yep it's there oh thank God okay we need
tape do you want better tape no you see the one in the back there has actually
managed to go each one of these lines represents 100 milliseconds so 100 200
about 270 milliseconds ahead of true time
which is this yellow Mark right here while the green one has actually drifted
about 120 milliseconds back so the
difference between them is about 400 milliseconds nearly half a second but
while that might have been fine in 1980 modern computers can perform literally
millions of calculations in that time which means there are Speedy boy over
here ends up waiting around for the slower second machine
now watch this
and it's time for an impromptu Vlog this is Ahmed who is much smarter than us and
knows how this works and he has remoted into our computer to synchronize our
nonsense here he like hand built this card apparently
what all that is doing right now is enabling the Precision Time protocol or
PTP which should
clamp things down to be nearly a million times more accurate than they were
before how are your kids doing on that I think I hear some kids in the background
getting lots of sleep I bet right
yeah
not true I apologize for Alex bunging up
all of your carefully configured stuff
did you say Alex is inbred what
we think we know what happened the Nick that is behind our time card here seems
to be experiencing some kind of thermal shutdown event whose idea was it to do
this with Nooks
yay I think we got it okay all right
awesome thank you now that we're synced up we can zoom all the way in we're at a
hundred milliseconds per line in our grid here we can go all the way down to
one microsecond you can see the difference is about 1.2 micro seconds
that's about a thousand nanoseconds and
when we're talking about time increments that small I mean you can actually see
that this offset is very constant between the two that's because that's
the amount of time it actually takes for the signal to pass through the fpga
through the PCI Express bus so we can actually put an offset in to have this
thing dialed in exactly to GPS time but
why does it matter I'm so glad you asked with two computers
honestly speaking it doesn't very much but if your
Facebook or Google or let's say the
entire internet making sure that every user gets the correct information is
very important I mean you don't want someone's friend list to change based on
which server they connect to for instance right so this means that every
time a request is made for some information checks need to be done to
ensure that the user is getting the most current information but deciding what
the most current information is can add
a lot of overhead in the past if there was some kind of disagreement it was
typically settled with a vote so the
request goes out and all of the machines need to decide what information is
correct by voting when half of the machines say the information is correct
it gets sent to the user this is easy enough if you just have a handful of
machines but when you're dealing with a data center where thousands or even
millions of machines are involved I think you can see why having all all of
them vote on every single user request isn't feasible so nowadays instead of a
vote a proposal is blasted out basically asking everyone hey is this the correct
dog photo and if no one yells back no it
needs to have the text Mondays then the
photo gets sent to the user but the thing is that this method assumes that
all of the clocks are in sync in order to work and if they aren't we can run
into problems for example let's say that
system a is two milliseconds behind true
time and system B is three milliseconds
ahead of true time these are totally realistic numbers by the way as you guys
saw if system B sends out a message and system a receives it almost immediately
in less than that difference less than five milliseconds system a will think
that it got a message from the future now thankfully the smart people at these
massive data centers they have some kind of fancy code to allow different
different machines to deal with receiving time stamped data in the
future right no they actually don't it turns out that
the most foolproof solution to this problem is to just add a massive 20
millisecond delay to every single
request to ensure that every machine is
always receiving data that is time stamped from the past that is why adding
an atomic clock to the mix and getting the timing of every computer down to
this nanosecond scale of precision and
accuracy both has such a profound performance impact in Facebook's case
they were able to get 100 times the
throughput by eliminating that 20 millisecond delay what makes this
incredibly cool though is that it can be used for way more than helping Facebook
efficiently sell your data or a hedge
fund make millions with computerized transactions the entire project is open
source and can be implemented by anyone any way they would like like if we
wanted nanoseconds level order
information on lttstore.com so we know
exactly who got a mouse pad you know before they're sold out again one of the
other ways that this could affect you in the coming years is Competitive Gaming
by having highly accurate clocks in every computer around the world packet
time stamping would become a lot simpler and especially more fair for people who
are geographically farther away from the game server I could be playing
Battlefield for instance against someone in Korea and since the server would know
down to a few dozen nanoseconds who
clicked first it would always accurately
determine who got a headshot and who's going back to the loadout screen so
Ahmed who hand built our time card and sent it to us really wants to create a
simpler version of this that could be put into any NVMe slot to give Gamers
access to this technology and since there's a good chance that the Nic in
their computer already supports PTP it's
not even that crazy of a goal in the
longer term hey Bigfoot networks dream of a of a gaming Nick that actually does
anything could finally come true yeah and implementing this super accurate
timing also has some really cool applications for the Fiber Optic Cables
running beneath the ocean roughly every 80 kilometers or so there's a signal
booster going across the ocean and if one of those goes down well it shouldn't
be a surprise to you that accessing a cable run that is several kilometers
underwater is pretty inconvenient but
the thing is before these repeaters give up the ghost they will usually start
running slower and with accurate timing
on either side you could actually figure out that the signal is taking longer
than expected and figure out which repeater is beginning to fail from here
you could reduce the amount of data going through it to extend the repeater's life and schedule repairs
even more mind-boggling the undersea cables can be used to detect
gravitational waves you might remember our video at the laser interface
ferrometer gravitational wave Observatory or ligo where they use
lasers to Super accurately measure changes in the physical size of the
Earth due to black holes colliding or something well ligo is actually
currently working with the time Appliance project to get the timing
between their three locations to within a single clock cycle of their processors
but by accurately measuring the time it
takes for light to cross the ocean you have suddenly turned the whole world
into a gravitational wave detector instead of just a four kilometer stretch
of desert in Washington State accurate timing also has huge implications for
security like if you know that it always takes 10 milliseconds for a message to
be sent between two computers if there's some deviation like if someone tried to
inject something or sniff the packets you can just ignore the data that didn't
arrive than you expected it to and finally PTP could have a huge impact on
streaming and live content currently there's no real way to verify the
Integrity of a stream you're basically just pushing out data and counting on
user complaints to tell you that something is wrong with it with tighter
clocks it should be possible to have much higher image quality with fewer
chances of corruption occurring along the way although with these examples we
are only scratching the surface of what can be done here the best part of all
this is that there are probably loads of ways that this Tech will be used that no
one has thought of yet and since again the whole project is open source anyone
can implement it and change it however they want there really isn't much in the
way of this gaining widespread support like I said before the tech is already
built into a lot of computers and is already being used by Regular People for
things like 5G and GPS so make sure to
hit like if you enjoyed this and spread the word also we're considering
implementing this in our office to see if we get some kind of network
performance benefit so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that are we
really going to do that uh uh maybe I'm not sure either what I am sure about is
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this and you're looking for more sciency videos from us check out our tour of
ligo the engineering that goes into the detection of gravitational waves is
truly mind-bending