Trends and Challenges in Big Data Processing.

Almost six years ago we started the Spark project at UC Berkeley. Spark is a cluster computing engine that is optimized for in-memory processing, and unifies support for a variety of workloads, including batch, interactive querying, streaming, and iterative computations. Spark is now the most active big data project in the open source community, and is already being used by over one thousand organizations. One of the reasons behind Spark's success has been our early bet on the continuous increase in the memory capacity and the feasibility to fit many realistic workloads in the aggregate memory of typical production clusters. Today, we are witnessing new trends, such as Moore's law slowing down, and the emergence of a variety of computation and storage technologies, such as GPUs, FPGAs, and 3D Xpoint. In this talk, I'll discuss some of the lessons we learned in developing Spark as a unified computation platform, and the implications of today's hardware and software trends on the development of the next generation of big data processing systems.