The Apache SystemML 1.2.0 release was approved on Aug. 24th, 2018. The release includes enhancements, features, and additions as listed below.

New Builtin Functions/Operations/Scripts/Features

• Factorization Machines
• Support for functions with default parameters
• exists() for checking of existing variables
• Triangular matrix functions: lower.tri() and upper.tri()
• New nary min/max operations
• as.matrix() over list of scalars
• Function calls with named function arguments
• Convolution operations (forward/backward)
• Maxpooling operations (forward)
• Support for bias_add and bias_mult
• Global constants
• Added support for rowProd/colProd
• DML eval function
• New data type list for lists and structs

API

• JMLC API extension for passing multiple dml scripts

Compiler & Runtime

• Code motion framework
• Global subexpression elimination
• Optional rewrite for hoisting loop-invariant operations
• Improved IPA constant propagation and replacement
• ParFor Data Partitioning Rewrite on Hops instead of Statements
• New rewrites for chains of comparisons
• Extended rewrite framework for codegen plans
• Improved parfor optimizer rewrite for in-place-update
• Rework function block recompilation
• Support rowMeans in codegen row templates

Performance Improvements

• Improved multi-threading of unary aggregates
• Reuse of fair scheduler pools in local parfor workers
• Performance issues Spark ctable(X,Y) w/ large num distinct
• Performance instruction generation
• Performance sample operations
• Performance ultra-sparse block operations
• New native tsmm operator and its integration
• Multi-threaded unary operations (e.g., exp, log, sigmoid)

Bug Fixes

• Memory leak buffer pool due to missing variable cleanup
• Missing buffer pool serialization of compressed matrices
• Compilation failure on inferring size of reshapes w/ zero rows/columns
• Incorrect result for min/max over matrices with NaNs
• Missing support for external functions with variable number of outputs
• Reblock ultra-sparse matrix fails with index out of bounds
• Performance issue CSE on DAGs w/ many root nodes (e.g., resnet200)
• Non-fused bias_add builtin creates incorrect results over sparse inputs
• Inconsistent namespace naming depending on OS
• Codegen failing on three-way multi-aggregate
• Codegen optimizer failing for MLogreg special cases
• Failing matrix market to binary reblock with zero rows/columns

Deprecated/Removed/Cleanup

• Opt level 4
• File-based removeEmpty()
• Cleanup exception handling apis/compiler/runtime

Experimental

• Parameter server: local backend and distributed
• Sparsity estimators

JIRA release notes