[moe]

They have to sync to something

As I understand it, they usually sync to GPS?

You can buy those boxes on Amazon[1], starting at around $299.

Google would have to find a real reason to throw $X0 million a year at this

$X0 million?!

To construct and run their own atomic clock, or what would they spend so much money on?

I may indeed be completely missing what this guy does. He runs an actual atomic clock in that rack, like the one from NIST[2]?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/TM1000A-GPS-Network-Time-Server/dp/B00...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST-F1

[vidarh]

The server you are showing is a stratum 1 time source intended for LAN use. It's not at all a given (and arguably not likely) that it would be suitable for exposing directly on the public internet to handle high traffic volumes. If not, then that means putting an ntpd in front of it, talking to it over the LAN, in which case you no longer have a stratum 1 time source available publicly.

I everyone had boxes like this, then yes, great, we'd not need reliable publicly accessible stratum 1 servers. But most people don't.

[moe]

I everyone had boxes like this, then yes, great, we'd not need reliable publicly accessible stratum 1 servers. But most people don't.

Um. We have "reliable publicly accessible stratum 1 servers".

Regardless of what happens with the NTPd software, Google will probably continue to provide time1-4.google.com.

NIST will not shut down their timeservers.

And the 3654 servers in pool.ntp.org[1] (which seems to be maintained by a different guy) also won't just disappear overnight, though I'm not sure if these are Stratum 1 (probably not).

I still don't understand what exactly this guy is doing that should cost more than the $7k/mo that he's getting, much less the "$X0 million a year" that vinceguidry wants to allocate to the task.

[1] http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone

[vinceguidry]

Reading the NTP wiki page leads me to believe he's maintaining several reference clocks that can be used if you have no atomic clocks of your own. I would guess that he has to maintain servers with different implementations of the time algorithms so he can test new code against them. He needs to be able to simulate network configurations so he can reproduce issues.