Interesting, I hadn't seen his article on LMAX. For more details (and the code) check out their google code page: http://code.google.com/p/disruptor.

The disruptor pattern itself was new to me but the general principles (particularly the idea of running trading business logic in a single thread with all data in memory and no garbage collection) is very familiar.

It's a silly name for a Pattern. All the others - Command, Strategy, Visitor, etc are more-or-less meaningful. In another blog post, they say they named it after the weapon in Star Trek. They could have called it Ring, because at the end of the day it is just a ring buffer.