About time

Abstract

Time has historically been a measure of progress of recurrent physical processes. Coordination of future actions, prediction of future events, and assigning order to events are three practical reasons for implementing clocks and signalling mechanisms. In large networks of computers, these needs lead to the problem of synchronizing the clocks throughout the network. Recent methods allow this to be done in large networks with precision around 1 millisecond despite mean message exchange times near 5 milliseconds. These methods are discussed.