Building fault-tolerant hardware clocks from COTS components

Author

Fetzer, Christof ; Cristian, Flaviu

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., California Univ., San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

fYear

1999

fDate

36465

Firstpage

67

Lastpage

86

Abstract

Clocks with a bounded drift rate are an important tool in the construction of dependable applications. However, the drift rates of clocks provided by operating systems on some computing platforms are not always bounded, e.g. due to lost interrupts or leap seconds. We show how one can build clocks with a bounded drift rate from components off-the-shelf (COTS). Our approach can be used to achieve a tight synchronization with UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) in systems with access to at least one GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver

Keywords

Global Positioning System; clocks; fault tolerant computing; operating systems (computers); COTS components; Coordinated Universal Time; GPS receiver; Global Positioning System; UTC; bounded drift rate; dependable applications; fault-tolerant hardware clocks; interrupts; off-the-shelf components; operating systems; synchronization; Clocks; Counting circuits; Fault tolerance; Global Positioning System; Hardware; Operating systems; Real time systems; Switches; Synchronization; Upper bound;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Dependable Computing for Critical Applications 7, 1999

Conference_Location

San Jose, CA

Print_ISBN

0-7695-0284-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/DCFTS.1999.814290

Filename

814290