Time synchronization serves a fundamental role in any network, but it's too often added as an afterthought. However, it can mean the difference between correctly troubleshooting a conflict in minutes and having no idea why the server is figuratively on fire. For financial and scientific institutions, time synchronization must be accurate to a billionth—or in some specific cases, even a trillionth—of a second, but even commercial and industrial organizations are starting to push for synchronization accuracy in the sub-millisecond range.
Why can't we just update our computers to the public NTP servers at NIST, which runs one of the world's most accurate clocks, and call it a day? Unfortunately, latency exists everywhere, and it makes perfect synchronization impossible. The speed of light is fast—in a vacuum, a photon could circle our world more than seven times per second—and even though it travels approximately 31 percent slower through a typical optical fiber network, you could easily transmit a single bit of data halfway around the world in less than a tenth of a second.
However, we all know that that ideal world doesn't exist. Add in switches, routers, and other network infrastructure, and that tenth of a second multiplies several times over. Without specialized equipment, your network is suddenly off by the better part of a second from NIST in the US or NPL in the UK.
Highly accurate and reliable synchronization of computer systems in financial applications is a key success factor and a mandatory prerequisite for being able to fulfill legal requirements. It also allows to measure network latency, enabling network engineers to optimize processes and transactions by identifying the bottlenecks in a transaction path. Time synchronization also helps to improve protection mechanisms against market abuse as it allows to identify manipulated time stamps. In order to be able to compare time stamps created by distributed systems or network nodes, they have to be based on the same reference. For legal reasons, this has to be the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) timescale which is the global reference for time. Traceability to UTC is a key requirement in most legislation.
The Meinberg time stamping unit HPS (High Precision Synchronization) provides a future-proof platform for your IEEE / NTP infrastructure. The high-performance processing unit, the 1-step master clock and the 1GE interface with SFP slot support a very large number of PTP clients. Thousands of IEEE slave devices or NTP clients can be synchronized, both in IPv4 and IPv6 networks, for example transaction servers running high-frequency trading applications.
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For NTP-based synchronization, each of the HPS-100 network interfaces can be configured to act as a carrier grade NTP server with 8 ns time stamp accuracy, serving up to NTP requests per second on each port. Each HPS module can serve time to up to 2,048 PTP Slaves at full Unicast rate (128 sync / 128 delay req. per second) or 250K DelayRequests per second in Enterprise Profile / Hybrid mode.
Meinberg offers an extensive product range for synchronizing financial data centers, trading solutions and analytical engines as well as transaction processing systems. The high quality and performance level of the LANTIME and SyncFire family ensure best-in-class synchronization accuracy and enable Meinberg customers to optimize their latency measurement solutions and fulfill all legal requirements concerning timestamp accuracy. Some of the worlds' largest exchanges chose Meinberg as their primary supplier for synchronization solutions based on Precision Time Protocol (PTP, IEEE ) and Network Time Protocol (NTP) technology.
Multinational investment banks, asset management corporations, clearing houses, data and listing services, derivatives and equity markets operators and participants rely on Meinberg technology in all relevant financial centers in Europe, North America, Asia/Pacific.
Contact us to discuss your requirements of Timing Synchronization for finance industry. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.