As part of our work to create and ultra-high performance financial exchange we looked into a lot of different approaches to high performance computing. We came to the conclusion that a lot of the common assumptions in this area were wrong.
We have done a lot of things to make our code fast and efficient, but the single most important thing has been to develop a new approach to managing the coordinated exchange of data between threads. This has made a dramatic difference to the performance of our code. We think it sets a new benchmark for performance, beating comparable implementations that use queues to separate processing nodes, by 3 orders of magnitude in latency and by a factor of 8 in throughput. You can watch a presentation, by a couple of my colleagues, describing one of our uses of this technology here.
I am pleased to announce that we have now released this as an open-source project. There is a technical article describing the approach and providing some evidence for our claims available at the site.
We think that this is the fastest way to write code that needs to coordinate the activity of several threads and all of our experiments so far have backed this up.
Why ‘Disruptor’?
Well there are two reasons, primarily we wanted to disrupt the common assumptions in this space because we think that they are wrong. But, to be honest, we also couldn’t resist the temptation; There was some talk about Phasers in Java at the time when we named it and, for those of you too young to care, Phasers were the Federation weapon and Disruptors the Klingon equivalent in Star Trek 😉