Accurate and reliable knowledge of time is fundamental to cyber-physical systems for sensing, control, performance, and energy efficient integration of computing and communications. This simple statement underlies the RoseLine project. Emerging CPS [Cyber Physical Systems – vy] applications depend on precise knowledge of time to infer location and control communication. There is a diversity of semantics used to describe time, and quality of time varies as we move up and down the system stack. System designs tend to overcompensate for these uncertainties and the result is systems that may be over designed, in-efficient, and fragile. The intellectual merit derives from the new and fundamental concept of time and the holistic measure of quality of time (QoT) that captures metrics including resolution, accuracy, and stability.
The project will build a system stack that enables new ways for clock hardware, OS, network services, and applications to learn, maintain and exchange information about time, influence component behavior, and robustly adapt to dynamic QoT requirements, as well as to benign and adversarial changes in operating conditions. Application areas that will benefit from Quality of Time will include: smart grad, networked and coordinated control of aerospace systems, underwater sensing, and industrial automation. The broader impact of the proposal is due to the foundational nature of the work which builds a robust and tunable quality of time that can be applied across a broad spectrum of applications that pervade modern life. Roseline.
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We sell pretty complex software that synchronizes clocks of computers, down to nanoseconds in many networks. Our customers are often firms where where IT staff, let alone higher management, are consumed by pressing issues, none of which have to do with the nuts-and-bolts of how ideal clock algorithms and time protocols interact with network equipment, operating systems, and application servers. Our easiest sales are to companies where some person is able to get perspective on the technical issue and relate it to business priorities. Otherwise, things get lost between IT staff running hard to keep up with day-to-day and big picture matters, and higher management who are “out of step with the mechanical details”. This is why the most successful big technology companies have built up corps of “technology fellows”, in practice if not formally. These are experts who can take a sufficiently deep dive into technology to appreciate the problem, who also understand business priorities, and who have management confidence. If someone with those skills had been involved in GMs key ignition lock discussions the company could have made far better decisions. As more and more firms become dependent on critical technology infrastructure, they will need to acquire people with such skills, in-house or not.
The story we were told at a bank that I cannot name is that all their time synchronization was the domain of an engineer tucked away for 30 years in the home office, a fellow known as Professor Time. The system he had built was remarkable in its complexity and fragility. Nobody seemed to understand how it worked. Accuracy was highly variable. There was no management, no documentation. We never got to meet the Professor, but I always thought of him as something like this.
In the past, the enterprise time synchronization market was composed of vendors that sold boxes to IT teams that were responsible for architecting a solution from GPS clocks and free software that was not at all designed for the job. Time synchronization is a specialized field that is a lot more complex than it may appear. And quality has become more of an issue as trading speeds and volume have increased so much. Some firms have responded to the change by scaling up their synchronization staffing. Some have relied on luck. Some hope that heavily marketed new technology in PTP aware routers will solve their problems.