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- Facebook engineers have built and open-sourced an Open Compute Time Appliance, an important component of the modern timing infrastructure.
- To make this possible, we came up with the Time Card — a PCI Express (PCIe) card that can turn almost any commodity server into a time appliance.
- With the help of the OCP community, we established the Open Compute Time Appliance Project and open-sourced every aspect of the Open Time Server.
In March 2020, we announced that we were in the process of switching over the servers in our data centers (together with our consumer products) to a new timekeeping service based on the Network Time Protocol (NTP). The new service, built in-house and later open-sourced, was more scalable and improved the accuracy of timekeeping in the Facebook infrastructure from 10 milliseconds to 100 microseconds. More accurate time keeping enables more advanced infrastructure management across our data centers, as well as faster performance of distributed databases.
The new NTP-based time architecture uses a Stratum 1 — an important component that is directly linked to an authoritative source of time, such as a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) or a cesium clock.
https://github.com/opencomputeproject/Time-Appliance-Project
