Hardware-assisted software clock synchronization for homogeneous distributed systems

A clock synchronization scheme that strikes a balance between hardware and software solutions is proposed. The proposed scheme is a software algorithm that uses minimal additional hardware to achieve reasonably tight synchronization. Unlike other software solutions, the guaranteed worst-cast skews can be made insensitive to the maximum variation of message transit delay in the system. The scheme is particularly suitable for large partially connected distributed systems with topologies that support simple point-to-point broadcast algorithms. Examples of such topologies include the hypercube and the mesh interconnection structures