Martin Thompson
High-Performance & Distributed Systems Specialist at Real Logic
United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMartin Thompson is a High-Performance and Distributed Systems specialist with over 15 years of experience architecting ultra-low-latency, high-throughput systems and more than three decades of deep domain expertise. As co-founder and former CTO of LMAX and current lead at Real Logic, he has driven systems that achieve hundreds of thousands to millions of transactions per second with microsecond response times. A hands-on engineer and consultant, he contributes to widely used open-source projects such as Aeron, Agrona, Disruptor and JCTools, improving core messaging, lock-free data structures and binary codecs used in finance and beyond. He runs the Mechanical Sympathy community, blending performance theory with practice, and is known for squeezing latency out of real systems through careful profiling, memory and concurrency optimisations. Based in the UK, Martin pairs entrepreneurial leadership with meticulous low-level engineering—often making small, non-obvious changes that yield outsized performance gains.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Computing & Information Systems, Computer Science, Computing & Information Systems, Computer Science at University of Ulster
Stackoverflow
1,826reputation
15kreached
41answers
0questions
Github Skills (33)
c-language10
messaging10
multithreading10
aeron10
data-structure10
java10
javas10
code-generation10
thread10
hyper-threading10
performance-optimization10
performance-tuning10
data-structures10
lock-free10
threaded10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
aeron-io/aeron
Feb 2014 - Jan 2023
Efficient reliable UDP unicast, UDP multicast, and IPC message transport
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:78 releases, 202 reviews, 9709 commits in 9 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Martin primarily worked on enhancing and maintaining the core functionality of the Aeron messaging system. Their contributions included enabling features, such as the sending of zero-length payloads in data frames, and improving the timestamping capabilities of data frames. Additionally, the user made changes related to cluster documentation and upgraded dependencies.
c-plus-plusmessage-transportipcipc-messagemessaging
aeron-io/agrona
Nov 2014 - Jan 2023
High Performance data structures and utility methods for Java
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:72 releases, 13 reviews, 1646 commits in 8 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Martin primarily focused on improvements to the core functionality of the data structures and utilities for the Java project. Their work involved optimizing the memory footprint, refactoring existing code, and resolving various performance issues with the hash code calculation. Key contributions include enhancements to the byte buffer and support for the new Java 14 file channel mapping.
performancemmapjavadata-structuresheap
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