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Apple Watch time technology
Apple says its new consumer electronic watch will synchronize to within 50 milliseconds of UTC time. Most of our customers in the financial trading sector need time to be within a microsecond - 50 thousand times better, but we were interested in what Apple is doing so we pointed TimeKeeper® at time.apple.com and looked at the time map -which is reproduced above.
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Best Practices with TimeKeeper® SourceCheck (2016)
The TimeKeeper ‘SourceCheck’ feature is an analytics and automated threat detection tool that allows TimeKeeper to detect bad time sources and switch away from them. Bad time can come from misconfiguration, equipment and software failures or intentional time based attacks. SourceCheck can detect and defeat them.
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TimeKeeper Versus Solarflare SFPTPd Comparison
TimeKeeper time and clock synchronization sets the standard for Enterprise and for Financial Trading. TimeKeeper management, fault-tolerance, traceable audit, and superior accuracy are not matched by any other product. This technical note compares TimeKeeper’s operation in the presence of a common network issue with the operation of free software provided to purchasers of Solarflare's PTP enabled network cards.
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The IEEE 1588 PTP standard tries to catch up to TimeKeeper
The new revisions to the PTP standard follow TimeKeeper's fault tolerance approach.
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Clock synchronization and Distributed data bases
Clock synchronization is foundational technology for modern distributed databases.
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Clock Sync in Finance and Beyond
FSMLabs produces a suite of clock synchronization products under the name TimeKeeper®, primarily for customers in financial trading but also for a wide range of customers in other fields: from first responders to internet gaming providers, managers of big data systems, and radio/TV recording and broadcast.
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120 Nansosecond Worst Case NTP Performance with TimeKeeper
TimeKeeper routinely produces sub-microsecond accuracy from NTP sources.
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2018 TimeKeeper Compliance Update
FSMTime talk given at Time & Money Conference, NY Stock Exchange
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Time Protection at Every Level with TimeKeeper
The TimeKeeper Suite of hardware and software products create a time network that offers very accurate synchronization, error-checking and validation of time, and the ability to manage and audit the time network.
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Clock Accuracy and Traceability
What do accuracy estimates mean in clock sync and how should they be validated?
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Introduction to Clock Sync in Finance and Beyond
TimeKeeper Client software runs on an application server computer (Linux, Windows, Solaris) and locks the system clock to time from some authoritative source (like a GPS clock). On standard enterprise networks, TK Client can make the system clock accurate to well below one microsecond. TK Client can receive time over either or both of the common network protocols for time distribution (PTP IEEE 1588 and NTP).
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Single source IEEE PTP 1588 cannot meet financial regulatory standards
A 2014 paper by engineers at IMC, NYSE, and Deutsche-Boerse spotlights single point of failures in IEEE 1588 PTP.
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TimeKeeper Compliance Deployment (2017)
View the TimeKeeper Grandmaster, Compliance and Active Client deployment architecture which highlights that TimeKeeper clients get time via PTP or NTP from TimeKeeper grandmasters. In addition, TimeKeeper Compliance runs on your own hardware to collect client logs and generate reports and gets data from grandmasters. Also, Compliance instances communicate to share data between data centers and/or duplicate records for disaster recovery.
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Time Synchronization for AWS and RHEL with TimeKeeper®: a solved problem
Accurate time synchronization in AWS is easy to achieve for those who want it. New
financial regulations (MiFID II and FINRA changes) require 1 millisecond and sometimes 100
microsecond accuracy to UTC time. Many social media, gaming and other applications
require similar accurate timing. In the past that was not easy since AWS is a virtualized
environment where system time does not always match “real time”. Getting past that is
pretty easy now, though.
Below we show that using the TimeKeeper software on an AWS system using a RHEL AMI
demonstrates very clearly that with the proper setup those time accuracy milestones are
easy to achieve.
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MiFID II - Ten Things You Need to Know About Clock Sync
Not only does MiFID II explicitly require working clock synchronization, but many of the recordkeeping requirements also cannot be met if time is not verifiably synchronized during the entire trading day. Here’s what you need to know:
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Cloudflare Leapsecond Lurch and time sync engineering
The default behavior of many clock synchronization systems is to lurch the clock on a leap-second but for TimeKeeper, default behavior is few minutes of speeding up or slowing down the clock (slewing) in order to prevent failures. Lurching or “stepping” on most leap seconds involves repeating a second on the clock.
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Leapsecond 2016 complete.
You can see that Google starts its 20 hour leap-second “skew” 10 hours before the event and then skews back to the real time. Everyone else stays correct and then has a short error as they “leap” the second and then come back into correct time.
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Leapsecond Eve 2016
Around 2PM UTC, Google’s time starts to veer off in preparation for the leap second. Everyone else is reasonably solid. The base time here is provided by GPS.
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NTP Authentication with TimeKeeper
Clock synchronization systems are vulnerable to a number of security failures that are exceptionally difficult to address. TimeKeeper has a growing portfolio of security protections to provide a defense in depth at wire speed.
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Time out of joint
Fincial trading venues and trading systems operate so quickly and rely on clocks so deeply that events like the one noted in this FINRA report are more common than many understand
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2016 Leap Second
Leap seconds have caused tremendous problems with IT systems in the past. The last few, in 2015, 2012, and 2008, resulted in thousands of servers crashing across the internet, leaving several sites (Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Gawker, Slashdot, Mozilla, and Quantas Airlines) out of service for a while.
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One Microsecond or Better with NTP
NTP can be the basis for UTC traceable 1 microsecond accurate time
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Five Years of Production Experience with Fault Tolerant Time Sync
Fault and compromise detection and recovery in enterprise networks
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Minimizing Spend on MiFID II Compliance
A customer recently pointed me at a series of blog posts about a project at a financial firm trying to comply with MiFID II clock regulations without TimeKeeper and “with minimum spend”. Reading the posts, it’s clear that costs are already well over what it would have cost them to buy TimeKeeper and they have a lot of work left.
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MiFID II 100 microsecond time sync on Windows with TimeKeeper and Mellanox
MiFID II 100 microsecond time sync on Windows with TimeKeeper and Mellanox
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MiFID II Clock Compliance with Windows is Easy Using TimeKeeper
TimeKeeper can bring Windows into MiFID II clock compliance using NTP.
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Talk on MiFID II given at Bank of England
Financial services
regulation of technology,
theory and practice.
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FINRA moves towards tighter timing requirements
From what we are hearing from our customers, the FINRA rule may have little effect because for many firms, the currently tougher MiFID II regulations are going to apply to world-wide operations.
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MiFID II Guidelines on Timestamping
ESMA guidelines issued at the end of 2015 clarify timestamp regulation in ways that make a lot of sense. The most immediately notable point was to reinforce earlier statements that GPS is an acceptable “traceable” source of time per MiFIR RTS 25.
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MiFID 2 timestamp requirements can be satisfied with GPS and other satellite time sources
ESMA just released guidelines that reinforce what was already clear in the MiFIDII regulation - that GPS time is an acceptable source of "traceable" time.
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Satellite (GPS) time and MiFID II requirements
Although we’re just technologists here, and not experts on European Union Regulatory Law, MiFID II is very specific.
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Windows 10 high accuracy timestamping
Windows 10 runs TimeKeeper for MiFID II compliance, automated trading requirements, and data analysis.
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MiFID II record keeping stresses timestamps
Algorithmic trading: Algorithmic trading records must be stored on an approved form accurate, time-sequenced records of all orders—whether placed, executed or cancelled. This rule applies not just to algorithmic trading, but to all trades; firms must keep for five years all the relevant data relating to all orders and transactions, whether for their own account or on behalf of clients.
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Mifid2 timestamps for SIs
There are a number of places in the new guidelines that increase the rigor required for timestamping data. One key part covers SI’s (systematic internalizers) who operate kind-of like private exchanges. TimeKeeper’s ability to produce traceable audit and to use multiple sources is designed for precisely this kind of application.
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Fault tolerance, TimeKeeper, and PTP Proposed Enterprise Profile
One of the most interesting things we saw in the proposed IEEE 1588 enterprise profile was a bold suggestion on fault tolerance that looked familiar. Here’s FSMLabs press release from September 2011
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Smart and Dumb PTP Client and the "so-called" Best Master Clock Algorithm
The Best Master Clock (BMC) algorithm is a key part and key weakness of the PTP standard.
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Synchronizing Time in the Cloud
The clocks on Cloud Virtual Machines are notoriously inaccurate and hard to synchronize with legacy technology but can be tightly controlled using TimeKeeper.
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ESMA Sub-Nanosecond time standard
Granularity and accuracy are very different things. Measuring time at nanosecond granularity is not a big deal but synchronizing clocks to nanosecond accuracy is at the edge of the possible for modern computing devices.
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Red Hat patches for the Leap Second
There will be a leap second June 30 2015 at midnight UCT. FSMLabs has tested TimeKeeper on Red Hat Linux and found that TimeKeeper handles the leap second properly.
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Comparing NTP and PTP
TimeKeeper synchronized clocks can be accurate to within 100 nanoseconds using either Network Time Protocol (NTP) or 1EEE 1588 Precise Time Protocol (PTP).
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2015 Leap Second
Leap seconds have caused tremendous problems with IT systems in the past. The last two, in 2012 and 2008, resulted in thousands of servers crashing across the internet leaving several sites (Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Gawker, Slashdot, Mozilla and Quantas Airlines) out of service for a while.
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TimeKeeper Fault Tolerance Capability (Dec 2014)
The financial services enterprise solution to time synchronization.
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HFT Controversy Reveals Technology Gaps on Wall Street
“Flash Boys,” by Michael Lewis, argues that high-frequency traders (HFTs) have been semi-secretly taking advantage of high-speed access to the stock exchanges in a way that unfairly disadvantages other traders. I don’t have a strong opinion about whether HFT is good or bad, fair or unfair; but there was nothing semi-secret about what HFTs were doing.
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Solved Problems in Clock Synchronization
When we started working on time (clock) synchronization in 2006/2007, the people pushing the envelope in applications were exposing requirements for levels of accuracy that were unprecedented outside of telecommunications.
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TimeKeeper and the competition
The TimeKeeper suite of products are more accurate, more reliable, and far more capable than the seemingly free and “nearly free” alternatives for time synchronization.
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Time Should Not Go Backwards
All data integrity is lost if the clock ever runs backwards. A bid sent by a trading program and confirmation received milliseconds later might be recorded as completing in reverse order. Analytical systems looking for trends would see time series that were wrong. The trading record would be useless in data analysis and dispute resolution.
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Cross Coupled Time for Greater Security
A common configuration for FSMLabs TimeKeeper customers is to cross-couple time sources in New Jersey and New York City or London and Slough or Chicago and Aurora or Singapore and Sidney - any two trading locations that are connected with high quality network.
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Industrializing Time Distribution - FSMLabs Spectracom partnership
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.
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Making a More Accurate Clock in the Cloud
Waters Technology discusses the issues and solutions involved in time synchronization in the cloud in a recent article.
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Visualizing time data in the EC2 cloud
TimeKeeper visualization software makes complex cloud time distribution networks easy to understand.
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Heartbleed and open source
The Heartbleed bug was caused by a business model error. When we were in the real-time software business, our best customer was an old line manufacturing business that wanted to make sure before they qualified us as a vendor that we were making a profit from selling software to them.
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How financial trading firms can get the time wrong by 35 seconds
There is a regulation called FINRA rule 7340 which requires US financial traders to keep their clocks synchronized to within one second of the official time from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This standard is probably way too weak for modern trading, which often takes place in microseconds, but even so, complying with the standard is a lot harder than it appears. In fact, clocks that are wrong by 35 seconds are not all that unusual because of astronomy and “leap seconds”.
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Managed Services and Cloud for Financial Industry
The nature of data security is constantly changing for the financial industry. With the ever-growing need for tighter IT infrastructure security and the increasing prevalence of BYOD-friendly workplaces, financial institutions are turning to managed services to help handle these changes.
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Avoiding Time Synchronization Pitfalls
There are a lot of potential pitfalls involved in deploying a timing solution across an enterprise. Some of them are technical - they can seriously impact the accuracy and reliability of the deployment.
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Challenges upgrading time synchronization in a global financial company
Even the most well financed, expertly staffed effort to use free software time clients and traditional GPS clocks does not produce a solid solution for time distribution.
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Making a More Accurate Clock in the Cloud
Waters Technology discusses the issues and solutions involved in time synchronization in the cloud in a recent article. Read the full text here.
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Mitre on GPS security or lack thereof
Modern communications networks depend on GPS-derived time and frequency reference signals
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Challenges deploying PTPv2 in a global financial company
Interesting article - most of these problems and more were solved in TimeKeeper years ago. But the most interesting part is the enormous engineering effort required to kind of get PTP to work.
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TimeTrace® Software
TimeTrace is a software-only latency monitoring tool designed to tell you where network latency and delays are coming from on your Linux based systems without requiring application or operating system modification. If fills the gap left by hardware solutions and is designed to be used in conjunction with them to give you a full latency picture.
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TimeKeeper, Clouds, Big Data (2014)
Clock synchronization can greatly simplify data synchronization tasks, which is a serious matter in big data environments
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The business case for being time protocol agnostic.
Time Synchronization and Distribution is a business critical issue but it is easy to become bogged down in arcane technology/marketing controversies.
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TimeKeeper Deployment Scenarios
This document provides some simple descriptions and diagrams of how to deploy TimeKeeper.
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TimeKeeper Pocket GrandMaster Datasheet
Read the full datasheet on FSMLabs’ Pocket GrandMaster product.
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FSMLabs’ CEO interview with low-latency.com
FSMLabs’ CEO, Victor Yodaiken, interviewed by low-latency.com
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Measuring Accuracy of Time Synchronization
A short tour of how to measure time synchronization clients and what performance to expect
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TimeKeeper® CloudTiming™ Architectures: Cloud, AWS EC2 & Virtual Host Time Sync
TimeKeeper time synchronization client, server and management software efficiently handles the unique environment of the cloud and virtual hosts. Legacy time synchronization solutions fail to synchronize time properly on virtual systems because they cannot cope with an environment where the clock is virtualized and may show discontinuous gaps in time. As a result, applications depending on legacy time synchronization technology in the cloud see time jump, lurches, and divergences. TimeKeeper recognizes this environment and is designed to synchronize the clock properly - always. With proper configuration, it’s possible to have near bare-metal hardware accurate time.
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Virtualization and Cloud time synchronization
Virtualization and Cloud time synchronization
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Using TimeKeeper ‘s web interface to explore the time distribution network
Using TimeKeeper's web interface, with it’s powerful data analysis and graphical
presentation, offers a way to make sense out of time distribution
networks.
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TimeKeeper Cyber Security
TimeKeeper provides strong protections against cyber attacks such as GPS spoofing. This presentation gives an overview.
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Trading technology is not baking Twinkies
A short discussion of “bakeoffs” and critical paths.
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Risk mitigation for financial trading time tracking
TimeKeeper brings to bear a significant technological advantage in reducing the risks to financial trading systems from fragility of time distribution and synchronization.
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Best Practices in Timing Infrastructure
We’ve seen some ‘interesting’ problems in deployed timing infrastructures. PTP Grandmasters that stop providing time on the network. Timing clients unable to determine that their timing source was completely wrong. Clients that are unable to fall back to another server, let alone another protocol. There really is a long list.
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Observing the leap second
A leap second was inserted June 30, 2012 - and we wanted to record how the leap second was handled via the various protocols - including PTP, NTP, and GPS, in both off the shelf software installs and with the latest network appliances. We also wanted to capture the network traffic over the period for later dissection.
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Choosing between PTP and NTP
Many people ask about the trade-offs between using the PTP (IEEE 1588) and the NTP protocols for time synchronization. Since TimeKeeper supports both I thought it a good idea to highlight a few of the differences between the two and why to choose one over the other.
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Complying with FINRA OATS
You’ve just made a large investment in your timing infrastructure - great timing sources, a solid network to provide clean and accurate time to clients, and tools to get accurate, low overhead time sync where it’s needed.
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Real World Failover with TimeKeeper
Timing accuracy is important, but so is the ability to retain that accuracy in the face of network outages and time source failures.
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Measurement of TimeKeeper and PTPd performance
Self-reported estimates of the accuracy of time synchronization software can be misleadingly incorrect. Here we detail how to independently test the accuracy of time synchronization and show the results
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FSMLabs TimeKeeper supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
FSMLabs® TimeKeeper adds time synchronization support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. This brings support for PTP, NTP, and external time sources with sub-microsecond precision directly to Red Hat applications.
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FSMLabs TimeKeeper
FSMlabs® TimeKeeper is a plug-in solution that replaces OS-generated time with distributed time-keeping, locked to accurate reference sources.
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