Event Timestamping Tool: a simple PC based kernel to timestamp distributed events
Pedro Martins, António Casimiro · 2000
This report describes the design and implementation of a tool to timestamp distributed events, using a standard PC hardware platform. The Event Timestamping Tool (ETT) is a small software kernel that detects externally generated events using two probe sources, and stores the respective timestamps with known precision bounds. A specialized kernel solution minimizes the response time for an event detection and registration and, consequently, maximizes the precision of the tool. Our approach exploits the Pentium processor internal timestamp counter to provide timestamps with fine granularity. 1 Introduction and Motivation In distributed systems computations are not restricted to one local machine and may take several machines to execute a single function. A computation is composed by a set of actions bounded by a start event, when the first action starts, and by an end event, when the last action terminates. In distributed computations (or actions), start and end ev...