Simple Precision Time Protocol at Meta

Simple Precision Time Protocol at Meta

摘要

We’ve previously spoken in great detail about how Precision Time Protocol is being deployed at Meta, including the protocol itself and Meta’s precision time architecture.

As we deployed PTP into one of our data centers, we were also evaluating and testing alternative PTP clients. In doing so, we soon realized that we could eliminate a lot of complexity in the PTP protocol itself that we experienced during data center deployments while still maintaining complete hardware compatibility with our existing equipment.

This is how the idea of Simple Precision Time Protocol (SPTP) was born.

But before we dive under the hood of SPTP we should explore why the IEEE 1588 G8265.1 and G8275.2 unicast profiles (here, we just call them PTP) weren’t a perfect fit for our data center deployment.