Good Times and Plugtoberfest at ISPCS 2019!

Meinberg attended this year’s International IEEE Symposium on Precision Clock Synchronization (ISPCS) in Portland, Oregon (USA). As the Platinum sponsor, Meinberg worked closely with the event organizers to facilitate industry cooperation and drive interoperability for the IEEE 1588 ecosystem.

A 2 ½-day plugfest kicked off the week with over 25 organizations and vendors setting up ad-hoc networks to verify that their devices and implementations are interoperable and support the IEEE 1588 standard correctly. Interoperability tests included several different industry-specific profiles such as the IEC ‪61850-9-3 and the IEEE C37.238 power profiles, the ITU-T G.8275.1 and G.8275.2 telecom profiles, the IEEE 802.1AS profile for Time Sensitive Networks (TSN), and PTP over PRP and HSR. Meinberg tested LANTIME IMS-series devices including the M1000 and the M3000 and our new microSync family.

For the first time, the ISPCS hosted a one-day Sync School part, with lectures covering sync fundamentals and advanced topics like White Rabbit, measurement techniques, and monitoring and debugging tools like Wireshark and Meinberg’s free PTP Track Hound software. The Sync School also gave its 26 participants the chance to check out demos for telecom, power, audio/video and White Rabbit/HA and interact with the experts presenting the demos.

To celebrate Meinberg’s 40th anniversary, Meinberg hosted an Oktoberfest style ‪dinner on Wednesday night‬ at Gustav’s, a German restaurant and pub in Portland. In addition to world class beer and great German food, a band playing traditional songs created a great Oktoberfest atmosphere. Meinberg team members, including Heiko Gerstung, Managing Director of Meinberg as well as Allan Armstrong, Executive Director of Marketing and Sales for North America and Wade Wiegand, Sales Engineer at Syntek, Meinberg’s North West representative, wore Lederhosen to complete the spectacle.‬‬

The symposium offered many interesting talks and presentations, including keynotes from Deutsche Telekom sync expert Helmut Imlau, Financial Trading Perfomance expert Pedro Estrela, and TSN expert Kevin Stanton of Intel. The keynotes delivered great insights into the state-of-the-art synchronization challenges and solutions for telecom networks, financial trading platforms, and new concepts for synchronizing multi core high end processors. Other papers presented during the symposium discussed a wide range of sync related topics, for example how IBM’s Z-series mainframes are now using PTP and how sync is impacting mobile phone applications. Peter Jansweijer and Henk Peek of NIKHEF won the ISPCS Best Paper Award by presenting a new scientific technique to determine the fiber delay coefficient in time-dissemination networks – Congratulations to Peter and Henk!

ISPCS attracts a diverse audience of vendors, research institutes, standardization organizations, and end users and is therefore a cornerstone of Meinberg’s event calendar. Next year’s ISPCS will take place in Vienna, Austria – the home of Oregano Systems, which is part of Meinberg. We are looking forward to this event and are honored to host you next year.