The Quantum Physics of Java

If we were able to take a microscope and observe how our programs work on the lowest level, we would be surprised and shocked. Close to the wire, programs behave very differently from what we expect.

In this session we will go through code examples that show the counter-intuitive behavior of Java on the microscopic scale. We will take a detailed look at how the underlying technology works that causes the surprising behavior and how we can measure our programs on the lowest level. Topics covered will be the cache hierarchy, false sharing, pipelining, branch prediction, and out-of-order execution.

After this talk you will have a good understanding of how modern CPUs work and how this can affect the performance of your programs.