Time in distributed systems

In distributed systems, time is a problem. Each computer has a clock built in, but those clocks are independent. The clocks on different machines can vary quite a bit. If a human being is setting them, then they’re probably at best accurate to one second. Even using a protocol like NTP, which synchronizes clocks between different computers, you can only get the clocks accurate to within about a millisecond of each other. But for a lot of things that we want to do with a collection of computers, we need to know what event happened first.