Apache SystemDS 0.14.0-incubating Release Notes

The Apache SystemML 0.14.0-incubating release was approved on May 8, 2017. It is the sixth release of Apache SystemML since it became an incubator project on November 2nd, 2015. Updates have been made to the project in several areas, as detailed below.

New Features and Capabilities

  • Runtime feature extensions (new libsvm-binary data converters, parfor spark buffer pool handling, parfor block partitioning of fixed size batches of rows or columns, native dataset support in parfor spark datapartition-execute)
  • Compiler feature extensions (improved parfor execution type selection, improved literal replacement for nrow/ncol, simplified instruction generation across back-ends, consolidated static/dynamic rewrite utilities)

Experimental Features

  • New Code Generation capabilities for automatic operator fusion (basic code generator, compiler integration, runtime integration, in-memory source code compilation, extended explain tool, support for right indexing and replace in cellwise and row aggregate templates, support for row, column, or no aggregation in rowwise template). Note code generation provides significant performance gains with fewer read/write intermediates, reduced scans of inputs and intermediates, and enhanced sparsity exploitation. To enable this feature, set codegen.enabled property to true in SystemML-config.xml file.
  • New instructions and operators for GPU support (relu_maxpooling, conv2d_bias_add, bias_multiply)

Removals

  • Removed support for Java 6 and Java 7
  • Removed parfor perftesttool and cost estimator

Various Fixes