Can one build the Hotspot VM, the Azul GC and the H20 big data engine without getting into the occasional battle and making a mistake or two? This talk distill the lessons of success and wrings wisdom out of failures over three decades in the industy.

The discussion and AMA following this talk will be moderated by Doug Lea.

Cliff Click was the CTO and Co-Founder of H2O, makers of H2O, the open source math and machine learning engine for Big Data. Cliff wrote his first compiler when he was 15 (Pascal to TRS Z-80!), although Cliff’s most famous compiler is the HotSpot Server Compiler (the Sea of Nodes IR). Cliff helped Azul Systems build an 864 core pure-Java mainframe that keeps GC pauses on 500Gb heaps to under 10ms, and worked on all aspects of that JVM. Before that he worked on HotSpot at Sun Microsystems, and was at least partially responsible for bringing Java into the mainstream. Cliff is invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences and has published many papers about HotSpot technology. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rice University and about 20 patents.