Yes, but what does the synchronisation? That's the essence of these algorithms - how to effectively create a single clock that is (acceptably) synchronised between nodes. Here's some lecture notes on the problem (and solutions):-
> In distributed systems, it is frequently unnecessary to know when something happened in a global context. Instead, it is only necessary to know the order of events. And often times it is only necessary to know the order of certain events, such as those that are visible to a particular host.
They are talking about logical clock implementations as a way to avoid having to build a potentially expensive sychronised 'physical clock' system with sufficient accuracy and security for the application.
The notes also talk about ways to get higher accuracy synchronisation.
I think parent meant that instead of using an auto-incremented integer for the local clocks, one could just use local time (which can also be expressed as an integer). As I mentioned in the other comment, I think that would break the guarantee that order can be inferred at the local level.
> In distributed systems, it is frequently unnecessary to know when something happened in a global context. Instead, it is only necessary to know the order of events. And often times it is only necessary to know the order of certain events, such as those that are visible to a particular host.
They are talking about logical clock implementations as a way to avoid having to build a potentially expensive sychronised 'physical clock' system with sufficient accuracy and security for the application.
The notes also talk about ways to get higher accuracy synchronisation.