 In my hand right now is an atomic clock, like the real kind with rubidium inside, and installing it promises to make your computer 100 times faster. That is, if your computer happens to be a massive data center. But seriously though, without a data center, we've got it working here in our lab, and based on what we've seen, this could be the biggest leap forward in computing this decade. It doesn't sound like the biggest deal on the surface, you know, nanosecond accurate time, synchronized between every computer on a network, so what, right? But so much computing overhead goes into compensating for signal delays, that this could do everything from improving the efficiency of live video broadcasts, to dramatically reducing in-game latency, to enhancing online security. And the craziest thing is that almost every device from this computer to my phone already has the necessary hardware to implement it. All they need is an accurate pulse from a card like this one, and they're off to the races. And we're going to show you guys how it works. And we're going to tell you about our sponsor, GlassWire. Are you lagging out while gaming? Use GlassWire and see what apps are wasting your bandwidth and causing your games to lag. Get 25% off using offer code LINUS at the link down below. Highly precise timing is a pretty mature technology at this point, and it's already being used in a number of critical applications, like power stations, where a mismatch between the AC output and the phase of the electrical grid could cause a big fire, or broadcasting, where all the cameras need to be synced up on the jumbotron to avoid tearing, or for scientific research, like at the Large Hadron Collider, or our friends over at LIGO. What is new about it is the affordability. Now, at $1,600, most gamers would probably choose an RTX 3090 or really almost anything else. But in the data center, that is chump change, and it's a fraction of what these solutions used to cost. So here's our setup to show you guys why this is important and just how good this technology is. Inside this Nook 9 Extreme is a rubidium atomic clock, which synchronizes to GPS time periodically using this antenna of this one. Not that it really needs to, given that a clock like this should drift about one second every 100 million years. And then over here, this is another computer. Now, in the course of communicating with our first computer, this one would normally attach timestamps to every data packet to ensure that they're processed and responded to in the correct order. But we've got a big problem. You see, these two computers, and probably the one you're using right now, are synchronized using the Network Time Protocol, or NTP. And NTP was awesome back when it was created by David Mills back in the 1980s. But to say that computers have gotten a little faster and the internet has expanded since then would be a gross understatement. So look at this. We've set each one of our computers to output a timing pulse every second. You can see right here, they're pretty close within a few milliseconds of true time. Oh, the blue one came unplugged. Hello? Oh, God, it broke a piece off of it. Is it alive? Please tell me we get signal main screen turn on. Yep, it's there. Oh, thank God. OK, we need tape. Do you want better tape? No. You see, the one in the back there has actually managed to go each one of these lines represents 100 milliseconds. So 100, 200, about 270 milliseconds ahead of true time, which is this yellow mark right here. While the green one has actually drifted about 120 milliseconds back. So the difference between them is about 400 milliseconds, nearly half a second. But while that might have been fine in 1980, modern computers can perform literally millions of calculations in that time, which means that our speedy boy over here ends up waiting around for the slower second machine. Now watch this. Control, shoot, V, da, da, da, da, da. And it's time for an impromptu vlog. This is Ahmed, who is much smarter than us and knows how this works. And he has remoted into our computer to synchronize our nonsense here. He like hand built this car, apparently. What Ahmed is doing right now is enabling the precision time protocol or PTP, which should clamp things down to be nearly a million times more accurate than they were before. How are your kids doing, Ahmed? I think I hear some kids in the background getting lots of sleep, I bet. Right. Yeah, everyone was like, oh, you can be home in three months. That'll be good. Not true. Not true. I apologize for Alex bunging up all of your carefully configured stuff. No, no, no, no way, but I'm sorry. Did you say Alex is inbred? What? We think we know what happened. The Nick that is behind our time card here seems to be experiencing some kind of thermal shutdown event. Whose idea was it to do this with nooks? Yeah, I think we got it. OK. All right. Awesome. Thank you. Now that we're synced up, we can zoom all the way in. We're at 100 milliseconds per line in our grid here. We can go all the way down to one microsecond. You can see the difference is about one point two microseconds. That's about a thousand nanoseconds. And when we're talking about time increments that small, I mean, you can actually see that this offset is very constant between the two. That's because that's the amount of time it actually takes for the signal to pass through the FPGA, through the PCI Express bus. So we can actually put an offset in to have this thing dialed in exactly to GPS time. But why does it matter? I'm so glad you asked. With two computers, honestly speaking, it doesn't very much. But if you're Facebook or Google or, let's say, the entire Internet, making sure that every user gets the correct information is very important. I mean, you don't want someone's friend list to change based on which server they connect to, for instance, right? So this means that every time a request is made for some information, checks need to be done to ensure that the user is getting the most current information. But deciding what the most current information is can add a lot of overhead. In the past, if there was some kind of disagreement, it was typically settled with a vote. So the request goes out and all of the machines need to decide what information is correct by voting. When half of the machines say the information is correct, it gets sent to the user. This is easy enough if you just have a handful of machines. But when you're dealing with a data center where thousands or even millions of machines are involved, I think you can see why having all of them vote on every single user request isn't feasible. So nowadays, instead of a vote, a proposal is blasted out, basically asking everyone, hey, is this the correct dog photo? And if no one yells back, no, it needs to have the text, Mondays, then the photo gets sent to the user. But the thing is that this method assumes that all of the clocks are in sync in order to work. And if they aren't, we can run into problems. For example, let's say that system A is two milliseconds behind true time and system B is three milliseconds ahead of true time. These are totally realistic numbers, by the way, as you guys saw. If system B sends out a message and system A receives it almost immediately in less than that difference, less than five milliseconds, system A will think that it got a message from the future. Now, thankfully, the smart people at these massive data centers, they have some kind of fancy code to allow different machines to deal with receiving timestamped data in the future, right? No, they actually don't. It turns out that the most foolproof solution to this problem is to just add a massive 20 millisecond delay to every single request to ensure that every machine is always receiving data that is timestamped from the past. That is why adding an atomic clock to the mix and getting the timing of every computer down to this nanosecond scale of precision and accuracy both has such a profound performance impact. In Facebook's case, they were able to get 100 times the throughput by eliminating that 20 millisecond delay. What makes this incredibly cool, though, is that it can be used for way more than helping Facebook efficiently sell your data or a hedge fund to make millions with computerized transactions. The entire project is open source and can be implemented by anyone any way they would like. Like if we wanted nanosecond level order information on LTTstore.com so we know exactly who got a mouse pad, you know, before they're sold out again. One of the other ways that this could affect you in the coming years is competitive gaming. By having highly accurate clocks in every computer around the world, packet timestamping would become a lot simpler and especially more fair for people who are geographically farther away from the game server. I could be playing Battlefield, for instance, against someone in Korea. And since the server would know down to a few dozen nanoseconds who clicked first, it would always accurately determine who got a headshot and who's going back to the loadout screen. So Ahmed, who hand built our time card and sent it to us, really wants to create a simpler version of this that could be put into any NVMe slot to give gamers access to this technology. And since there's a good chance that the NIC in their computer already supports PTP, it's not even that crazy of a goal in the longer term. Hey, Bigfoot Networks dream of a gaming NIC that actually does anything could finally come true. Yeah. And implementing this super accurate timing also has some really cool applications for the fiber optic cables running beneath the ocean. Roughly every 80 kilometers or so, there's a signal booster going across the ocean. And if one of those goes down, well, it shouldn't be a surprise to you that accessing a cable run that is several kilometers underwater is pretty inconvenient. But the thing is, before these repeaters give up the ghost, they will usually start running slower. And with accurate timing on either side, you could actually figure out that the signal is taking longer than expected and figure out which repeater is beginning to fail. From here, you could reduce the amount of data going through it to extend the repeaters life and schedule repairs. Even more mind boggling, the undersea cables can be used to detect gravitational waves. You might remember our video at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory or LIGO, where they use lasers to super accurately measure changes in the physical size of the Earth due to black holes colliding or something. Well, LIGO is actually currently working with the Time Appliance Project to get the timing between their three locations to within a single clock cycle of their processors. But by accurately measuring the time it takes for light to cross the ocean, you have suddenly turned the whole world into a gravitational wave detector instead of just a four kilometer stretch of desert in Washington state. Accurate timing also has huge implications for security. Like if you know that it always takes 10 milliseconds for a message to be sent between two computers. If there's some deviation, like if someone tried to inject something or sniff the packets, you can just ignore the data that didn't arrive when you expected it to. And finally, PTP could have a huge impact on streaming and live content. Currently, there's no real way to verify the integrity of a stream. You're basically just pushing out data and counting on user complaints to tell you that something is wrong with it. With tighter clocks, it should be possible to have much higher image quality with fewer chances of corruption occurring along the way. Although with these examples, we are only scratching the surface of what can be done here. The best part of all of this is that there are probably loads of ways that this tech will be used that no one has thought of yet. And since again, the whole project is open source, anyone can implement it and change it however they want. There really isn't much in the way of this gaining widespread support. Like I said before, the tech is already built into a lot of computers and is already being used by regular people for things like 5G and GPS. So make sure to hit like if you enjoyed this and spread the word. Also, we're considering implementing this in our office to see if we get some kind of network performance benefit. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. Are we really going to do that? Uh, maybe. I'm not sure either. What I am sure about is our sponsor. Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. If you need a website and don't know how to make it, Squarespace makes it easy. There's a wide selection of award winning templates and all of them are optimized for mobile. So your website will look great on any device. You can create members only content for extra revenue using Squarespace's members area. You can grow and engage with your audience with the powerful and easy to use email campaign system. And if you ever need additional help, Squarespace offers webinars, a full series of help guides, or you can contact their 24 7 customer support via live chat and email. So don't wait. Get started today by going to squarespace.com forward slash LTT where you can get 10% off your first purchase. If you enjoyed this and you're looking for more sciency videos from us, check out our tour of LIGO. The engineering that goes into the detection of gravitational waves is truly mind bending.