Communication
The lessons of timekeeping are part of engineering technology. In electrical engineering terms, for digital logic and data transfer, a synchronous object requires a clock signal. Timekeeping technologies such as the GPS satellites and Network time protocol (NTP) provide real-time access to a close approximation to the UTC timescale, and are used for many terrestrial synchronization applications.
Synchronization is an important concept in the following fields:
- Computer science (In computer science, especially parallel computing, synchronization refers to the coordination of simultaneous threads or processes to complete a task; in order to obtain correct runtime order and avoid unexpected race conditions.)
- Cryptography
- Multimedia
- Music (Rhythm)
- Neuroscience
- Photography
- Physics (The idea of simultaneity has many difficulties, both in practice and theory.)
- Synthesizers
- Telecommunication
Synchronization has several subtly distinct sub-concepts:
- Phase synchronization
- Rate synchronization
- Time offset synchronization
- Time order synchronization
Read more about this topic: Synchronization