Presentation: "The Application Memory Wall - thoughts on the state of the art in Garbage Collection"

Time: Wednesday 16:50 - 17:50

Location: Olympic

Abstract: The original "memory wall" first predicted in the mid 1990's was supposed to have emerged by now, with applications stretching server capabilities to their limits. However, today's typical application instance only utilizes 5-10% of a modern server's capacity, and the percentage is dropping. In this session, Gil Tene (CTO, Azul Systems) discusses the Application Memory Wall and and the likely causes of an observed decade-long stagnation in application instance memory growth and consumption. Gil will analyze the key technical challenges that have led to the emergence of the Application Memory Wall, reviewing the relevant state of the art in garbage collection within managed runtimes in general, and in commercial Java Virtual Machines in particular. Gil will outline the main technical problem areas that need industry attention and focus, and shows how solving these problems can lead to a post-Wall era - an era in which applications will once again be free to productively and naturally consume the abundant compute resources available in modern servers.

Gil Tene, Vice President of Technology and CTO, Co-Founder for Azul Systems

Gil Tene

Gil has been involved with virtual machine technologies for the past 20 years and has been building Java technology based products since 1995. He co-founded Azul Systems in 2002 with the goal of eliminating common Java responsiveness, performance, scale, and overall deployment barriers. Gil guides Azul Systems architectural vision and product design to align with business and market opportunity strategies.

At Azul, Gil pioneered Pauseless Garbage Collection, Java Virtualization, and various managed runtime and systems stack technologies that combine to deliver the industry's most scalable and robust Java platform.

Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Gil was Director of Technology 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, and the industry's first subscriber edge Broadband Service Node.

Gil architected operating systems for Stratus Computer, clustering solutions at Qualix/Legato, and served as an officer in the Israeli Navy Computer R&D unit. He holds a BSEE from The Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and has been awarded 19 patents in computer related technologies.

Twitter: @giltene