Ars Technica’s Chris Lee has spent a good portion of his adult life playing with lasers, so he’s a big fan of photon-based quantum computing. Even as various forms of physical hardware like ...

Research conducted by two physicists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US reveals that clocks on Mars tick 477-millionths of a second (or 477 microseconds) faster ...

The IT industry has gotten good at developing computer systems that can easily work at the nanosecond and millisecond scales. Chip makers have developed multiple techniques that have helped drive the ...

Forget Greenwich Mean Time or Eastern Daylight Time, scientists say we need a brand new time zone – for Mars. That's because clocks on the Red Planet will tick 477 microseconds faster than those on ...

Computer systems, hardware and networking technologies have improved so much that two of the world’s largest trading exchanges say they have begun measuring transaction times in microseconds. What is ...

Performance is a topic that never strays far from the mind of most embedded systems developers. However, relatively speaking, many of us have it easy. We develop soft real-time systems in which a few ...

A windstorm in Colorado caused a power outage at NIST, disrupting US official timekeeping and causing a 4.8-microsecond lag. Although atomic clocks ran on battery, a backup generator failure affected ...

This version of the story originally appeared in Computerworld‘s print edition. In the machine-vs.- machine world of financial trading, where IT is constantly trying to increase performance, ...