[altantiprocrast]

Sorry for the ignorance, but what is the point of getting this accurate in the datacenter (outside of scientific research and measurements I'd imagine)?

Wouldn't it be easier to just make distributed servers deal with large 'packets' or large individual tasks on their own?

[paxys]

There's an entire class of problems where you need to synchronize application state between data centers. For that, if two conflicting requests show up in different data centers at the ~same time, different servers need to agree on which one came first, and for that they need to be on as close to the same time as possible. Even being off by milliseconds doesn't cut it when request volume is high.