Java at the Cutting Edge

The Java platform is well known for productivity and scale, but it's potential performance benefits are often less well understood. With Java being regularly applied in high performance, high throughput and latency sensitive applications, this track focuses on Java topics at the cutting edge of performance.

Day of week:

Tuesday

Location:

Grand Ballroom A

Host:

Gil Tene

Presentations

Java vs. C/C++ Performance Panel

1:35pm - 2:25pm

By: Gil Tene , Martin Thompson , Keith Adams
CTO and co-founder of Azul Systems-- High Performance & Low Latency Specialist-- Co-founder of Facebook’s Runtime: HipHop Virtual Machine

This is a question that almost everyone doing a major project asks: should I use C++, or Java, or C#? Maybe it is more abstract than that, such as, should I use native code, like C++, or a managed runtime, like Java? Mostly, this is a matter of taste. Or is it? When it comes to ultimate performance, most applications are native, C++/C, with even having some hand crafted assembler mixed in.

But can Java, or any managed runtime in general, do nearly as good? Or maybe it could do better than native code. What could applications do to leverage the most out of these languages? With C++11, has the game changed? With Java 7 or 8, has the game changed? Or has the game really changed with the acceptance of Erlang? These and more, fellow developers, will be questions asked on this panel. It is native code vs. managed runtime in the game of performance!

Java Open Space

2:50pm - 3:40pm

By:

Practicing at the cutting edge: Learning and unlearning about Java performance

10:30am - 11:20am

By: Martin Thompson
High Performance & Low Latency Specialist

They say that wisdom comes with age. Like many concepts in software, we have an imperfect proxy here. Age being the imperfect proxy for experience, discovery, and learning. 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 his experience with Java since its inception. Starting with building financial GUIs to run on OS2 and NT, then the era of Servlets and J2EE, streaming data and media concurrently to thousands of devices, processing and indexing the largest catalogues, encryption on mobile phones, LMAX and the Disruptor, and 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 major steps in the evolution of Java and how it contrasts to C/C++ over time. We will also cover the 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 development culture in many industries and organisations.

Presentations

Java 8 : Functional Performance

5:20pm - 6:10pm

By: Alex Buckley
Spec Lead, Java Language & VM

Java 8 will provide dramatic upgrades to the Java language and VM technology. Coming in Java 8 are language extensions to add support for lambdas and a new parallel Streams library. Together these offer a dramatic generational change to the way Java applications will be built and deployed. The new Streams API makes it much easier for applications to fully utilize modern multicore hardware.

This session will introduce the new language and library features in Java 8 and the VM technology which enables them. We'll look at some examples of converting existing business logic for parallel streams execution and examine the performance benefits, tradeoffs and occasional pitfalls.

Java Marshalling: A Performance Approach

4:05pm - 4:55pm

By: Todd Montgomery
‎VP, Architecture, Messaging Business Unit at Informatica

Marshaling is central to message and protocol processing as well as storage of complex data structures... and there is no lack of approaches to marshalling data using Java. Everything from POJO to a whole host of recent options, including Thrift and Avro. All of them share a lot of the same tradeoffs and most perform quite horribly. The Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol is used extensively in the trading world for a number of communication and storage purposes. Recently a new encoding for FIX, the Simple Binary Encoding (SBE), has been proposed and is aimed at very low latency systems. In this talk, we will discuss the evolution of a new approach to marshalling in Java using FIX/SBE, new marshalling API approaches, and the extensive application of mechanical sympathy to this well understood problem domain.

Enabling Java in Latency Sensitive Environments

11:45am - 12:35pm

By: Gil Tene
CTO and co-founder of Azul Systems

The low latency Java landscape is changing. Fast. In the past, applying Java to latency and jitter sensitive applications involved sacrifices, tradeoffs, compromises, and contortions that significantly diminished both the productivity and leverage benefits usually associated with the Java platform. But that was the past. In this talk, Gil Tene (CTO, Azul Systems) explores the present. A recently available present, where new capabilities in the very platforms used to execute low latency applications eliminate many of those prior tradeoffs and compromises. Where modern Java applications can achieve consistently low latency while at the same time using the full spectrum of the Java platform's capabilities. Gil will examine the core issues that have historically kept Java environments from performing well in low latency environments, and explain how the removal of key platform obstacles is now driving a rapid change in both the development and the operational practices for low latency Java. After explaining how and why Java applications can finally expect not only speed, but highly contained maximum platform latencies to be "out of the box" behaviors, Gil will contrast and compare some of the practices and restrictions forced on low latency developers in the past with the techniques they can now use freely to achieve new levels of speed, consistency, productivity, and innovation.