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Gil Tene, CTO and Co-founder, Azul Systems

Gil Tene

Biography: Gil Tene

Gil Tene is CTO and co-founder of Azul Systems. He has been involved with virtual machine technologies for the past 20 years and has been building Java technology-based products since 1995. Gil pioneered Azul's Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector (C4), Java Virtualization, Elastic Memory, and various managed runtime and systems stack technologies that combine to deliver the industry's most scalable and robust Java platforms.

In 2006 he was named one of the Top 50 Agenda Setters in the technology industry by Silicon.com. Prior to co-founding Azul, Gil held key technology positions at Nortel Networks, Shasta Networks and at Check Point Software Technologies, where he delivered several industry-leading traffic management solutions including the industry's first Firewall-1 based security appliance. He architected operating systems for Stratus Computer, clustering solutions at Qualix/Legato, and served as an officer in the Israeli Navy Computer R and D unit. Gil holds a BSEE from The Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and has been awarded 27 patents in computer-related technologies.  

Twitter: @giltene

Presentation: Enabling Java in Latency Sensitive and Low Jitter Environments

Track: Solution Track Thursday / Time: Thursday 14:30 - 15:20 / Location: Abbey Room

Applying Java to latency and jitter sensitive applications typically involves sacrifices, tradeoffs, and contortions that greatly diminish the value, leverage, and productivity that are usually associated with the Java platform. In this talk, Gil Tene (CTO, Azul Systems) will explore newly available technologies that enable modern Java applications to finally achieve the long-sought-after goal of consistently low latency coupled with high, sustainable throughputs, and still use the full spectrum of the Java platform's capabilities. After examining the core issues that have historically kept Java environments from performing well in low latency, low jitter environments, Gil will describe technologies and deployment techniques that now allow Java developers to achieve worst case platform latencies of 10 milliseconds and less "out of the box", and maximum platform latencies of 2-3 milliseconds with very little tuning effort. Gil will share some aggressive system tuning methods that can even drive peak Java application latencies below the 1 millisecond mark, and highlight some of the "secret sauce" that makes such breakthroughs in Java platform behavior possible.

Presentation: How NOT to Measure Latency

Track: Finance (Design & Architecture) / Time: Thursday 15:40 - 16:30 / Location: Elizabeth Windsor

Time is Money. Especially in finance sector applications. Understanding application responsiveness and latency is critical not only for delivering good application behavior. It is critical for maintaining profitability and containing risk. But good characterization of bad data is useless. When measurements of response time present false or misleading latency information, even the best analysis can lead to wrong operational decisions and poor application experience.

In this presentation, Gil Tene (CTO, Azul Systems) discusses some common pitfalls encountered in measuring and characterizing latency. Gil demonstrates and discusses some false assumptions and measurement techniques that lead to dramatically incorrect reporting results, and covers simple ways to sanity check and correct these situations. He discusses the fallacy of using standard deviation measurements, the strongly multi-modal nature of latency, common discontinuities found in most computing platforms, and how back pressure and coordinated data omission issues can literally skew measurement results by orders of magnitude. Gil introduces and demonstrates how simple and recently open sourced tools can be used to improve and gain higher confidence in both latency measurement and reporting.