Parallel Data Laboratory Talk - Yaron Minsky June 26, 2025 12:00pm — 1:00pm Location: Virtual Presentation - ET - Remote Access - Zoom Speaker: YARON MINSKY , Head of Technology, Jane Street https://github.com/yminsky The Saga of Multicore OCaml In December 2022, after nearly a decade of development, OCaml 5 was released with a multi-core capable garbage collector. This was an exciting milestone, finally making it possible to write shared-memory parallel programs in OCaml. The new runtime was designed to be easy to adopt: it didn’t disturb OCaml’s FFI, and performance was meant to be only a couple of percentage points slower in single-core mode. Despite those promising beginnings, moving to the new runtime was harder than we expected. Indeed, We’ve only managed to switch to it this year, after 18 months of research and engineering effort to overcome a significant number of serious performance problems we uncovered. This talk is essentially about technology transfer: about what it takes to move an academic result from theory into practice. We’ll talk about some of what we learned, both about GC design, and about how to analyze and fix subtle performance regressions in a complex ecosystem.—Yaron Minsky got his BA in Mathematics from Princeton and his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell focusing on distributed systems. He joined Jane Street in 2003, where he founded the firm's quantitative research group. He introduced OCaml, a statically typed functional programming language, to the company and managed the transition to using OCaml for all of its core infrastructure, turning Jane Street into the world's largest industrial user of the language. He's been involved in many different aspects of Jane Street's technology stack, including machine learning infrastructure, distributed systems design, incremental programming systems, hardware synthesis, trading and risk systems, developer tools, and user-interface toolkits. Zoom Participation. See announcement. Event Website: https://pdl.cmu.edu/talk-series/index.shtml Add event to Google Add event to iCal
