Matthew Farwell sent a note about an article on LMAX by Martin Fowler ( http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html ) to the Java Posse mailing list.  I found it a very interesting read for anyone interested in high performance computing.  Having recently completing a Java project achieving 3 million business operations per second using the Actor model with a 12 core machine and feeling pretty happy, it was fascinating to read about a 6 million operation per second system based on a single thread.  Of course the operations could be different complexities, but I have no doubt the LMAX project put a more time and into the performance analysis than my project did.  Thought provoking stuff, and definitely worth a read for anyone doing high performance concurrent programming.