If you need more accuracy than NTP by itself can give you, then you have specialized needs and you need to understand those needs very well, as no general solution is likely to work for you. that said, there is a protocol for it, PTP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol
PTP and NTP are about the same without hardware support.
With hardware support, and without any thought or tuning-- you probably get your machines synchronized 2 orders of magnitude closer. (From sub-millisecond to a few microseconds). And, of course, PTP can do much better than this.
I agree with everything you said. Most problem domains probably have no need for more than what NTP can deliver. Regardless, if NTP alone can't solve your time problems, then you need to really understand what your actual problem is, as there is no guarantee that PTP can solve it either.
> Regardless, if NTP alone can't solve your time problems, then you need to really understand what your actual problem is, as there is no guarantee that PTP can solve it either.
Yah... on the other hand, there's a whole lot of applications where precision is a nice-to-have but not a necessity--- e.g. better ordering events between multiple machines without vector clocks, etc, when we're troubleshooting.
