Low-Cost Hybrid Internal Clock Synchronization Mechanism for COTS PC Cluster (Research Note)

NTP is a well-known and widely used clock synchronization mechanism for PC cluster environments. However, like other software-based clock synchronization algorithms, its precision depends on the estimated accuracy of the network latency for synchronization messages. This paper presents a low-cost internal clock synchronization mechanism that uses a simple TTL signal distributor to support remote clock reading to obtain the time drift necessary to execute local clock adjustments. The objective is to improve precision, thus eliminating the need to estimate the network latency as in usual methods.