Cumulon: optimizing statistical data analysis in the cloud

We present Cumulon, a system designed to help users rapidly develop and intelligently deploy matrix-based big-data analysis programs in the cloud. Cumulon features a flexible execution model and new operators especially suited for such workloads. We show how to implement Cumulon on top of Hadoop/HDFS while avoiding limitations of MapReduce, and demonstrate Cumulon's performance advantages over existing Hadoop-based systems for statistical data analysis. To support intelligent deployment in the cloud according to time/budget constraints, Cumulon goes beyond database-style optimization to make choices automatically on not only physical operators and their parameters, but also hardware provisioning and configuration settings. We apply a suite of benchmarking, simulation, modeling, and search techniques to support effective cost-based optimization over this rich space of deployment plans.