QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.
Martin Thompson, TweetHigh-Performance Computing Specialist at Real Logic
Biography: Martin Thompson
Martin is a high-performance and low-latency specialist, with over two decades working with large scale transactional and big-data systems, in the automotive, gaming, financial, mobile, and content management domains. He believes in Mechanical Sympathy, which is applying an understanding of the hardware to the creation of software, being fundamental to delivering elegant high-performance solutions. Martin was the co-founder and CTO of LMAX, until he left to specialise in helping other people achieve great performance with their software. The Disruptor concurrent programming framework is just one example of what his mechanical sympathy has created.
Twitter: @mjpt777
Blog: Mechanical Sympathy
Video presentations: YOW! 2011: Martin Thompson - On Concurrent Programming and Concurrency Folklore
Presentation: TweetPracticing at the Cutting Edge: Learning & Unlearning about Performance
When pushing a technology to the limits of performance one has a lot to learn and then unlearn over time as the language, runtime, operating systems, and hardware evolves.
Martin will reflect on Java since its inception. Starting with building financial GUIs, the era of Servlets and J2EE, processing and indexing the largest catalogues, transaction processing and the Disruptor, and then the current generation of low-latency trading applications that must cope with millions of events per second with latency measured in the microseconds.
The talk will focus on the evolution of Java and how it contrasts to C/C++. We will also cover the cultural challenges of pushing the limits of performance and how we need to collaborate with industry experts and organise our teams, which often stands at odds with the culture in many organisations.