The Berlin Big Data Center (BBDC)

Abstract The last decade has been characterized by the collection and availability of unprecedented amounts of data due to rapidly decreasing storage costs and the omnipresence of sensors and data-producing global online-services. In order to process and analyze this data deluge, novel distributed data processing systems resting on the paradigm of data flow such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, or Apache Flink were built and have been scaled to tens of thousands of machines. However, writing efficient implementations of data analysis programs on these systems requires a deep understanding of systems programming, prohibiting large groups of data scientists and analysts from efficiently using this technology. In this article, we present some of the main achievements of the research carried out by the Berlin Big Data Cente (BBDC). We introduce the two domain-specific languages Emma and LARA, which are deeply embedded in Scala and enable declarative specification and the automatic parallelization of data analysis programs, the PEEL Framework for transparent and reproducible benchmark experiments of distributed data processing systems, approaches to foster the interpretability of machine learning models and finally provide an overview of the challenges to be addressed in the second phase of the BBDC.

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