LECTURE -2

VIRTUAL TIME AND GLOBAL STATE

Prof. D. S. Yadav
Department of Computer Science 1
IET Lucknow
 THE CONCEPT OF TIME
• The Concept of Time

 A standard time is a set of instants with a temporal precedence

order < satisfying certain conditions [Van Benthem 83]:
 Transitivity
 Irreflexivity
 Linearity
 Eternity (xy: x<y)
 Density (x,y: x<y  z: x<z<y)

 Transitivity and Irreflexivity imply asymmetry

Note :
REFLEXIVE RELATION: A relation R is said to be reflexive over a set A if (a,a) € R for every a € A.
 SYMMETRIC RELATION: A relation R is said to be symmetric if (a,b) € R => (b,a) € R
 TRANSITIVE RELATION: A relation R is said to be Transitive if (a,b) € R, (b,c) € R => (a,c) € R.

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 TIME AS A PARTIAL ORDER

• A linearly ordered structure of time is not always adequate for

distributed systems
 Captures dependence, not independence of distributed activities

• A partially ordered system of vectors forming a lattice structure

is a natural representation of time in a distributed system

• Resembles Einstein-Minkowski’s relativistic space-time

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 GLOBAL TIME & GLOBAL STATE OF
DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
• Asynchronous distributed systems consist of several processes
without common memory which communicate (solely) via
messages with unpredictable transmission delays
• Global time & Global State are hard to realize in distributed
systems
 Processes are distributed geographically
 Rate of event occurrence can be high (unpredictable)
 Event execution times can be small
• We can only approximate the global view
 Simulate synchronous distributed system on given asynchronous
systems
 Simulate a global time – Logical Clocks
 Simulate a global state – Global Snapshots

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 SIMULATE SYNCHRONOUS
DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
• Synchronizers [Awerbuch 85]

 Simulate clock pulses in such a way that a message is only

generated at a clock pulse and will be received before the
next pulse
 Drawback
 Very high message overhead

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 SIMULATING GLOBAL TIME :
CLOCK SKEW & CLOCK DRIFT

• An accurate notion of global time is difficult to achieve in

distributed systems.
 We often derive “causality” from loosely synchronized clocks

• Clocks in a distributed system drift

 Relative to each other
 Relative to a real world clock
 Determination of this real world clock itself may be an issue
 Clock Skew versus Drift
• Clock Skew = Relative Difference in clock values of two
processes
• Clock Drift = Relative Difference in clock frequencies (rates) of
two processes

• .

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CLOCK SYNCHRONIZATION

• A non-zero clock drift will cause skew to continuously increase

• Maximum Drift Rate (MDR) of a clock
 Absolute MDR is defined relative to a Coordinated Universal Time
(UTC)
 MDR of a process depends on the environment.
 Max drift rate between two clocks with similar MDR is 2 * MDR
Max-Synch-Interval = (MaxAcceptableSkew — CurrentSkew) /
(MDR * 2)
• Clock synchronization is needed to simulate global time
 Correctness – consistency, fairness
• Physical Clocks vs. Logical clocks
 Physical clocks - must not deviate from the real-time by more than
a certain amount.
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PHYSICAL CLOCK SYNCHRONIZATION

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PHYSICAL CLOCKS
• How do we measure real time?
 17th century - Mechanical clocks based on astronomical
measurements
 Solar Day - Transit of the sun
 Solar Seconds - Solar Day/(3600*24)
 Problem (1940) - Rotation of the earth varies (gets slower)
 Mean solar second - average over many days

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ATOMIC CLOCKS
• 1948
 counting transitions of a crystal (Cesium 133) used as
atomic clock
 TAI - International Atomic Time
 9192631779 transitions = 1 mean solar second in 1948
 UTC (Universal Coordinated Time)
 From time to time, we skip a solar second to stay in
phase with the sun (30+ times since 1958)
 UTC is broadcast by several sources (satellites…)

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ACCURACY OF COMPUTER CLOCKS
• Modern timer chips have a relative error of 1/100,000 -
0.86 seconds a day
• To maintain synchronized clocks
 Can use UTC source (time server) to obtain current notion
of time
 Use solutions without UTC.

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 CRISTIAN’S (TIME SERVER) ALGORITHM

• Uses a time server to synchronize clocks

 Time server keeps the reference time (say UTC)
 A client asks the time server for time, the server responds with its
current time, and the client uses the received value T to set its clock

• But network round-trip time introduces errors…

 Let RTT = response-received-time – request-sent-time
(measurable at client),
 If we know (a) min = minimum client-server one-way
transmission time and (b) that the server timestamped the
message at the last possible instant before sending it back
 Then, the actual time could be between [T+min,T+RTT— min]

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 CRISTIAN’S ALGORITHM

 Client sets its clock to halfway between T+min and T+RTT—

min i.e., at T+RTT/2
Expected (i.e., average) skew in client clock time = (RTT/2 – min)

 Can increase clock value, should never decrease it.

 Can adjust speed of clock too (either up or down is ok)
 Multiple requests to increase accuracy

For unusually long RTTs, repeat the time request

For non-uniform RTTs
Drop values beyond threshold; Use averages (or weighted
average)

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BERKELEY UNIX ALGORITHM
• One daemon without UTC
• Periodically, this daemon polls and asks all the machines for
their time
• The machines respond.
• The daemon computes an average time and then broadcasts
this average time.

DECENTRALIZED AVERAGING ALGORITHM

• Each machine has a daemon without UTC
• Periodically, at fixed agreed-upon times, each machine broadcasts its
local time.
• Each of them calculates the average time by averaging all the received
local times.

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CLOCK SYNCHRONIZATION IN DCE
• DCE’s time model is actually in an interval

 I.e. time in DCE is actually an interval

 Comparing 2 times may yield 3 answers
 t1 < t2
 t2 < t1
 not determined
 Each machine is either a time server or a clerk
 Periodically a clerk contacts all the time servers on its LAN
 Based on their answers, it computes a new time and
gradually converges to it.

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NETWORK TIME PROTOCOL (NTP)
• Most widely used physical clock synchronization protocol
on the Internet (http://www.ntp.org)
 Currently used: NTP V3 and V4
• 10-20 million NTP servers and clients in the Internet
• Claimed Accuracy (Varies)
 milliseconds on WANs, submilliseconds on LANs,
submicroseconds using a precision timesource
 Nanosecond NTP in progress

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NTP DESIGN
• Hierarchical tree of time
servers.
 The primary server at the
root synchronizes with the
UTC.
 The next level contains
secondary servers, which act
as a backup to the primary
server.
 At the lowest level is the
synchronization subnet which
has the clients.

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 NTPS OFFSET DELAY ESTIMATION METHOD

• Source cannot accurately estimate

local time on target •A pair of servers in symmetric mode
 varying message delays exchange pairs of timing messages.
• NTP performs several trials and
chooses trial with minimum delay •A store of data is then built up about
 Let a = T1−T3 and b = T2−T4. the relationship between the two
 If differential delay is small, the clock offset Ɵ
and roundtrip delay δ of B relative to A at time servers (pairs of offset and delay).
T4 are approximately given by Specifically, assume that each peer
Ɵ= (a + b)/2, δ = a − b maintains pairs (Oi ,Di ), where Oi -
measure of offset; Di - transmission
Server B T2 T3 Time delay of two messages.

•The eight most recent pairs of (O, D ) i

m m' are retained.

•The value of O that corresponds to

i

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Time minimum D is chosen to estimate O.
i

Server A T1 T4
From (http://www.ece.udel.edu/~mills/database/brief/seminar/ntp.pdf)
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From (http://www.ece.udel.edu/~mills/database/brief/seminar/ntp.pdf)
ASSIGNMENT 1

WRITE A TERM PAPER ON

ADVANCEMENT IN VIRTUAL TIME AND

CLOCK SYNCHRONIZATION : TOOLS &
TECHNIQUES

LAST DATE OF SUBMISSION : 08 SEPT 2019

DATE OF PRESENTATION : WILL BE
ANNOUNCED LATER

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