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I didn’t want to click this so I assume others here won’t either. Here’s the top points they highlight themselves:
- 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 [1] and open-sourced every aspect of the Open Time Server.[2]
1. https://www.opencompute.org/projects/time-appliances-project...
2. https://github.com/opencomputeproject/Time-Appliance-Project...
Do you mean the facebook/oculus flicks? Wonder why the repo is archived...
https://github.com/facebookarchive/Flicks
What's interesting to me is how the form factor of timing GPS modules has stayed constant over the years. I started my GNSS timing journey with a used Trimble GPS from the 2000s, and it has the same form factor and pinout as the modern multi-constellation timing GPSes from uBlox.
I've had a GPS clock going for several years at this point, and without an atomic clock or really any fanciness (just LinuxPPS and Chrony), I see about +/- 380ns, which is pretty good. NTP to the Internet gives me jitter in the range of about 20ms-70ms, about 5 orders of magnitude worse.
(The version a few iterations ago looked like this: https://github.com/jrockway/beaglebone-gps-clock. But I now have a uBlox multi-constellation GPS, which is much more accurate with my limited view of the sky from my Brooklyn apartment. And I 3D printed the case, so it actually looks presentable instead of like some crazed madman that attacked a plastic case with a hacksaw -- which is exactly how I made the first case. As for the DS3231 RTC that I added... that seems to be stable within about 1.5us, which is pretty impressive. I tuned it a little bit with the trim register, though.)
It looks like the source for their FBOSS agent that runs on switches will enable PTP in two kinds of supported switches:
https://github.com/facebook/fboss/blob/master/fboss/agent/hw...
They have O(thousands) of switches (source: https://engineering.fb.com/2016/10/18/data-center-engineerin...) so IIRC they get the per-switch cost down by doing a custom design to reduce BOM. I believe the specs and designs are available under the Open Compute project here (search for "Facebook"): https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Networking/SpecsAndDesigns
PTP is required in a number of 5G implementations. Facebook's 5G core (Magma - https://github.com/magma/magma) utilizes it quite a bit.
How about the x2 series from Xilinx?
It comes from solarflare who have a long pedigree of low-latency smartnics. They used to supply Cloudflare, and also supply like 50% of fintechs/financial markets.
You can also just use openonload to accelerate your programs. In this case just doing straight linux socket programming, which can be accelerated without dpdk. Or just use the generic linux driver if necessary.
https://github.com/Xilinx-CNS/onload