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Time, but Faster

By Theo Schlossnagle
Communications of the ACM, March 2017, Vol. 60 No. 3, Pages 38-41
10.1145/3024916
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Time, but Faster, illustration — Credit: Credit: John Tenniel / Shutterstock

Every once in a while, you find yourself in a rabbit hole, unsure of where you are or what time it might be. This article presents a computing adventure about time through the looking glass.

The first premise was summed up perfectly by the late Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." The concept of time, when colliding with decoupled networks of computers that run at billions of operations per second, is ... well, the truth of the matter is you simply never really know what time it is. That is why Leslie Lamport's seminal paper on Lamport timestamps was so important to the industry, but this article is actually about wall-clock time, or a reasonably useful estimation of it.

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