Home // ICNS 2013, The Ninth International Conference on Networking and Services // View article

A High-precision Time Handling Library

Authors:
Irina Fedotova
Eduard Siemens
Hao Hu

Keywords: high-performance computing; network measurement; timestamp precision; time-keeping; wall clock.

Abstract:
An appropriate assessment of end-to-end network performance presumes highly efficient time tracking and measurement with precise time control of the stopping and resuming of program operation. In this paper, a novel approach to solving the problems of highly efficient and precise time measurements on PC-platforms and on ARM-architectures is proposed. A new unified High Performance Timer and a corresponding software library offer a unified interface to the known time counters and automatically identify the fastest and most reliable time source, available in the user space of a computing system. The research is focused on developing an approach of unified time acquisition from the PC hardware and accordingly substituting the common way of getting the time value through Linux system calls. The presented approach provides a much faster means of obtaining the time values with a nanosecond precision than by using conventional means. Moreover, it is capable of handling the sequential time value, precise sleep functions and process resuming. This ability means the reduction of wasting computer resources during the execution of a sleeping process from 100% (busy-wait) to 1-1.5%, whereas the benefits of very accurate process resuming times on long waits are maintained.

Pages: 193 to 199

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: March 24, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4006

ISBN: 978-1-61208-256-1

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from March 24, 2013 to March 29, 2013