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SystemML provides declarative large-scale machine learning (ML) that aims at flexible specification of ML algorithms and automatic generation of hybrid runtime plans ranging from single node, in-memory computations, to distributed computations on Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. ML algorithms are expressed in a R or Python syntax, that includes linear algebra primitives, statistical functions, and ML-specific constructs. This high-level language significantly increases the productivity of data scientists as it provides (1) full flexibility in expressing custom analytics, and (2) data independence from the underlying input formats and physical data representations. Automatic optimization according to data characteristics such as distribution on the disk file system, and sparsity as well as processing characteristics in the distributed environment like number of nodes, CPU, memory per node, ensures both efficiency and scalability.