Module-3

Time and Global States

Department of
Computer Science & Engineering

www.cambridge.edu.in
 Clocks
• The instantaneous difference between the readings of any two
clocks is called their skew.

• Clock drift, which means that they count time at different

rates, and so diverge.

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 Coordinated Universal Time
• Computer clocks can be synchronized to external sources of
highly accurate time.
• Coordinated Universal Time – abbreviated as UTC (from the
French equivalent) – is an international standard for
timekeeping.
• UTC signals are synchronized and broadcast regularly from
land based radio stations and satellites covering many parts of
the world.

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 Synchronizing Physical clocks
In order to know at what time of day events occur at the
processes in our distributed system – for example, for
accountancy purposes – it is necessary to synchronize the
processes’ clocks.
External synchronization: means that all computers in the
system are synchronized with an external source of time (e.g., a
UTC signal). Clocks Ci are synchronized with one another to a
known degree of accuracy.
Internal synchronization: means that all computers in the system
are synchronized with one another, but the time is not
necessarily accurate with respect to UTC.

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 Synchronization in a synchronous system
• Internal synchronization between two processes in a synchronous
distributed system.
• One process sends the time t on its local clock to the other in a
message m.
• In principle, the receiving process could set its clock to the time t +
Ttrans , where Ttrans is the time taken to transmit m between them.
The two clocks would then agree (since the aim is internal
synchronization, it does not matter whether the sending process’s
clock is accurate).

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 Cristian’s method for synchronizing clocks

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 Cristian’s method for synchronizing clocks
Algorithm:
1) The process on the client machine sends the request for fetching clock
time(time at the server) to the Clock Server at time T0 .
2) The Clock Server listens to the request made by the client process and returns
the response in form of clock server time.
3) The client process fetches the response from the Clock Server at time T1
and calculates the synchronized client clock time using the formula given below.
Tclient=Tserver+(T1-T0)/2

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 Cristian’s method for synchronizing clocks
• Cristian’s method suffers from the problem associated with all services
implemented by a single server:
that the single time server might fail and thus render synchronization
temporarily impossible.
• Cristian suggested, for this reason, that time should be provided by a group of
synchronized time servers, each with a receiver for UTC time signals.
• For example, a client could multicast its request to all servers and use only the
first reply obtained.
• Note that a faulty time server that replied with spurious time values, or an
imposter time server that replied with deliberately incorrect times, could wreak
havoc in a computer system.

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 The Berkeley algorithm
• Describe an algorithm for internal synchronization that they
developed for collections of computers running Berkeley UNIX.
• In it, a coordinator computer is chosen to act as the master.
Unlike in Cristian’s protocol, this computer periodically polls the
other computers whose clocks are to be synchronized, called
slaves.
• The slaves send back their clock values to it. The master
estimates their local clock times by observing the round-trip
times (similarly to Cristian’s technique), and it averages the
values obtained.

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 The Network Time Protocol

• Cristian’s method and the Berkeley algorithm are intended

primarily for use within intranets.
• The Network Time Protocol (NTP) [Mills 1995] defines an
architecture for a time service and a protocol to distribute time
information over the Internet.

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 The Network Time Protocol

NTP’s chief design aims and features are as follows:

• To provide a service enabling clients across the Internet to be
synchronized accurately to UTC.
• To provide a reliable service that can survive lengthy losses of
connectivity.
• To enable clients to resynchronize sufficiently frequently to offset
the rates of drift found in most computers.
• To provide protection against interference with the time service,
whether malicious or accidental.

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 The Network Time Protocol

The NTP service is provided by a network of servers located across

the Internet.
Primary servers are connected directly to a time source such as a
radio clock receiving UTC.
Secondary servers are synchronized with primary servers.
The servers are connected in a logical hierarchy called a
synchronization subnet whose levels are called strata.

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 Logical Time and Logical clocks

We can use a scheme that is similar to physical causality but that

applies in distributed systems to order some of the events that occur
at different processes.
This ordering is based on two simple and intuitively obvious points:
• If two events occurred at the same process pi ( i =1, 2,… N) , then
they occurred in the order in which pi observes them.
• Whenever a message is sent between processes, the event of
sending the message occurred before the event of receiving the
message.

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 Logical Time and Logical clocks

Lamport called the partial ordering obtained by generalizing these

two relationships the happened-before relation. It is also sometimes
known as the relation of causal ordering or potential causal ordering.

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 Logical Time and Logical clocks

The happened-before relation is a partial ordering of events in

distributed systems such that: if events a and b are two events
happening at the same node, the relation a → b holds if the
occurrence of event a preceded the occurrence of event b. This is easy
to determine for a single node.

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 Logical Time and Logical clocks

We can define the happened-beforerelation, denoted by , as follows:

HB1: If every process Pi :e→ie', then e →e’ .
HB2: For any message m, send(m)→ receive(m)
– where send(m) is the event of sending the message, and
receive(m) is the event of receiving it.
HB3: If e, e’ and e’’ are events such that e→ e’ and e’→ e’’ , then e→
e’’ .

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 Logical Time and Logical clocks

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 Logical clocks
• Lamport [1978] invented a simple mechanism by which the
happened before ordering can be captured numerically, called a
logical clock.
• A Lamport logical clock is a monotonically increasing software
counter, whose value need bear no particular relationship to any
physical clock.
• Each process pi keeps its own logical clock, Li , which it uses to
apply so-called Lamport timestamps to events. We denote the
timestamp of event e at pi by Li(e) , and by L(e) at whatever process
it occurred at.

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 Logical clocks
• To capture the happened-before relation → processes update their
logical clocks and transmit the values of their logical clocks in
messages as follows:
LC1: Li is incremented before each event is issued at process pi :
Li := Li + 1.
LC2: (a) When a process pi sends a message m, it piggybacks on m
the value t = Li.
(b) On receiving (m, t), a process pj ,computes Lj := max( Lj ,t)
and then applies LC1 before timestamping the event
receive(m).

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 Totally ordered logical clocks
• If e is an event occurring at pi with local timestamp Ti , and e is an
event occurring at pj with local timestamp Tj , we define the global
logical timestamps for these events to be (Ti,i) and (Tj,j) ,
respectively.
• And we define (Ti, i) < (Tj, j) if and only if either Ti < Tj , or Ti = Tj and
i< j. This ordering has no general physical significance (because
process identifiers are arbitrary), but it is sometimes useful.
Lamport used it, for example, to order the entry of processes to a
critical section.

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 Vector clocks
• Mattern [1989] and Fidge [1991] developed vector clocks to
overcome the shortcoming of Lamport’s clocks: the fact that from
L(e)< L(e’) we cannot conclude that e→ e’.
• A vector clock for a system of N processes is an array of N integers.
• Each process keeps its own vector clock, Vi , which it uses to
timestamp local events.

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 Vector clocks
• Like Lamport timestamps, processes piggyback vector timestamps
on the messages they send to one another, and there are simple
rules for updating the clocks:
VC1: Initially, Vi [j]= 0 , for i, j = 1, 2…… N.
VC2: Just before pi timestamps an event, it sets Vi [i]:=Vi[ i]+ 1.
VC3: pi includes the value t =Vi in every message it sends.
VC4: When pi receives a timestamp t in a message, it sets
Vi[j]:= max(Vi[j], t[j]) , for j= 1, 2… N. Taking the component wise
maximum of two vector timestamps in this way is known as a
merge operation.
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 Logical Time and Logical clocks

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 Vector clocks

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 Global States

Some of the global properties are:

• distributed garbage collection
• deadlock detection
• termination detection and
• debugging

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 Distributed garbage collection

• An object is considered to be garbage if there are no longer any

references to it anywhere in the distributed system

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 Distributed deadlock detection

• A distributed deadlock occurs when each of a collection of

processes waits for another process to send it a message, and
where there is a cycle in the graph of this ‘waits-for’ relationship.

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 The ‘snapshot’ algorithm of Chandy and
Lamport
The algorithm assumes that:
• Neither channels nor processes fail – communication is reliable so
that every message sent is eventually received intact, exactly once.
• Channels are unidirectional and provide FIFO-ordered message
delivery.
• The graph of processes and channels is strongly connected (there is
a path between any two processes).
• Any process may initiate a global snapshot at any time.
• The processes may continue their execution and send and receive
normal messages while the snapshot takes place.
Example