 clock synchronization is a problem from computer science and engineering which deals with the idea that internal clocks of several computers may differ. even when initially set accurately, real clocks will differ after some amount of time due to clock drift, caused by clocks counting time at slightly different rates. there are several problems that occur as a repercussion of clock rate differences and several solutions, some being more appropriate than others in certain contexts. in serial communication, some people"transmission on a serial line" use the term "clock synchronization" merely to discuss getting one metronome-like clock signal to pulse at the same frequency as another onefrequency synchronization (plesiochronous or isochronous operation), as opposed to full phase synchronization (synchronous operation). such "clock synchronization" is used in synchronization in telecommunications and automatic baud rate detection. ==problems== besides the incorrectness of the time itself, there are problems associated with clock skew that take on more complexity in a distributed system in which several computers will need to realize the same global time. for instance, in unix systems the make command is used to compile new or modified code without the need to recompile unchanged code. the make command uses the clock of the machine it runs on to determine which source files need to be recompiled. if the sources reside on a separate file server and the two machines have unsynchronized clocks, the make program might not produce the correct results.gnu `make' ==solutions== in a centralized system the solution is trivial; the centralized server will dictate the system time. cristian's algorithm and the berkeley algorithm are some solutions to the clock synchronization problem in a centralized server environment. in a distributed system the problem takes on more complexity because a global time is not easily known. the most used clock synchronization solution on the internet is the network time protocol (ntp) which is a layered client-server architecture based on udp message passing. lamport timestamps and vector clocks are concepts of the logical clocks in distributed systems. ===cristian's algorithm===  cristian
Clocks Distributed_computing_problems Synchronization