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Perfect time synchronization over a network with unknown latency is provably impossible.

Fairly certain distributed physics experiments will be using atomic clocks that are not synchronized over the network. And/or they'll use direct satellite or GPS time sources which have predictable latencies.



CERN at least seems to be using a solution that is running over Ethernet[1] but with custom hardware that is probably fairly expensive. They use a single time source and then measure the delay between each switch/node. Though, this is limited by needing to be able to run a cable between each node so idk how your definition of a distributed experiment fits.

[1]: http://white-rabbit.web.cern.ch/




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