bittide is building system architectures for synchronous distributed computing. For more info go to github.com/bittide

Publications

  1. Modeling and Control of bittide Synchronization (2022 American Control Conference) describes the design of the system, including how frames are communicated within bittide, and how communication is synchronized with computation to provide applications with a perfect logical clock. The paper develops a mathematical model for the clock behaviors and shows some example simulations.

  2. Resistance Distance and Control Performance (2022 European Control Conference) for bittide Synchronization analyzes the frequency synchronization mechanism of bittide, and develops quantitative methods for analyzing its performance, in particular focusing on the sizes of frequency deviations and buffer occupancies.

  3. On Buffer Centering for bittide Synchronization (CoDIT 2023) develops an algorithmic refinement of the bittide mechanism which allows precise control of the buffer occupancies.

  4. Logical Synchrony Networks: A Formal Model for Deterministic Distribution discusses how bittide’s decoupling process execution from process synchronization enables preserving determinism and boundedness. The paper shows how Kahn Process Networks satisfy the LSN abstraction, and shows a comparison between FIFO platforms and bittide.

  5. Logical Synchrony and the bittide Mechanism describes the logical time abstraction and how distributed processes may be synchronized within it. The invariants of the system are analyzed, and the latency properties are characterized.

  6. bittide: Control Time, not Flows (HOTI 2025) presents the first hardware implementation of bittide, detailing the design using off-the-shelf FPGA boards and adjustable clock sources.

  7. Modeling Buffer Occupancy in Bittide Systems (2025 American Control Conference) analyzes the steady-state occupancy of the elastic buffers, a critical factor affecting system latency.

  8. Timetime: A programming model for logically synchronous distributed systems ([2025 ACM TECS]) develops a novel multiclock semantics of synchronous programs.

  9. Buffer Centering for bittide Synchronization via Frame Rotation (2025 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control) introduces the frame-rotation method for centering buffer occupancies in a bittide network.