Apache SystemDS 3.4.0 Release Notes

Release notes for SystemDS 3.4.0

SystemDS 3.4.0 is a minor release with Java 17 support, native Delta Lake I/O, Vector API execution paths, and runtime improvements.

Runtime Requirements

  • Java 17 is required.
  • JVMs that launch SystemDS must enable the Vector API with --add-modules=jdk.incubator.vector.
  • Custom Java launchers and spark-submit deployments must pass the required Java 17 module and package-open options to every JVM.

New Features

  • Native Delta Lake readers and writers for matrices and frames, built on Delta Kernel with Parquet data-file support.
  • Vectorized execution and optimized Einstein summation (einsum).
  • Expanded Scuro multimodal and time-series processing.
  • New built-ins and algorithms, including:
    • LARS, missing-data mechanism detection, Hidden Markov Models, and HDBSCAN.
    • Clustered classification, BERT layers, GloVe, and counter-based random generation.

Runtime and Performance Improvements

  • Improved compressed execution, matrix multiplication, transforms, and workload-aware intermediate compression.
  • Faster frame conversion and Python/JVM data transfer.
  • Improved Spark context management, compiler rewrites, and GPU compatibility.

Federated Runtime

  • Improved worker lifecycle handling, planning, and workload analysis.
  • Fixed threading and synchronization issues.

Experimental Out-of-Core Execution

  • Introduces an experimental out-of-core framework for workloads that exceed the JVM heap.
  • Supports selected matrix operations, I/O, streams, caches, and iterative algorithms.
  • Remains incomplete and is not recommended for production use.

Bug Fixes and Other Improvements

  • Fixed issues in mdedup, ampute, Isolation Forest, unique, trace compatibility, compiler rewrites, and federated execution.
  • Updated Java 17 build, Docker, CI, and release infrastructure; added Databricks deployment material and documentation.
  • Updated key dependencies: Spark 3.5.7, Hadoop 3.3.6 client libraries, Scala 2.12.18, Delta Kernel 3.3.2, Parquet 1.13.1, and JCuda 12.6.0.