Java Magazine - July/August 2012

JCP Executive Series
A Conversation
with Gil Tene
Azul Systems CTO Gil Tene discusses the state of Java and the JCP.
BY JANICE J. HEISS

JAVA IN ACTION

In the first of a series of interviews with distin- guished members of the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process (JCP), we sat down with Azul Systems CTO and Cofounder Gil Tene, who represents Azul on the JCP, to get his take on how things are going with Java and the JCP. Azul Systems, a builder of highly scalable Java Virtual Machines (JVMs), has been a JCP member since 2003 and a member of the Executive Committee since November 2011.

Java Magazine: Tell us a little about your day job. Tene: I’m the CTO of Azul Systems, and at Azul we focus on building highly scalable JVMs. So our world is Java and only Java, which is why the JCP and the Java community are central to everything we do. Over the years, we’ve delivered massively scalable JVMs that can run on platforms with anywhere from a couple to almost a thousand CPU cores, and a handful to hundreds and thousands of gigabytes of memory. We’re probably best known for our very concurrent garbage collection and the effective elimination of garbage collection pauses as an issue for response-time-sensitive enterprise Java applications.

I mix both hands-on engineering, where I work within and with the teams at Azul, and a lot of external activity involving conferences and papers and customer interaction. I’ve been doing this at Azul for about 10 years, and it’s the most fun that I’ve ever had at a job. Azul is like a toy store for engineers. I’ve specifically worked on various parts of scalable JVMs, including everything from concurrent garbage collectors to locking and transactional memory. We’ve always had the approach of doing “whatever it takes” for runtime scalability. I’ve built kernel code and advanced virtual memory management code,