Intel Chip Chat

Dr. Ziya Ma, vice president of Intel® Software and Services Group and director of Data Analytics Technologies, gives Chip Chat listeners a look at data center optimization along with a preview of advancements well underway. In their work with the broad industry, Dr. Ma and her team have found that taming the data deluge calls for IT data center managers to unify their big data analytics and AI workflows. As they’ve helped customers overcome the memory constraints involved in data caching, Apache Spark*, which supports the convergence of AI on big data, has proven to be a highly effective platform. Dr. Ma and her team have already provided the community a steady stream of source code contributions and optimizations for Spark. In this interview she reveals that more – and even more exciting work – is underway. Spark depends on memory to perform and scale. That means optimizing Spark for the revolutionary new Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory offers performance improvement for the data center. In one ex