OpenPOWER Summit North America 2019

Modern big data systems are highly heterogeneous. Components are implemented in a wide variety of programming languages and frameworks. Due to implementation differences, interfaces between components are burdened by serialization overhead. The Apache Arrow project helps to overcome this burden through a language-agnostic columnar in-memory format for big data applications. The open-source Fletcher framework is an implementation of Arrow for FPGA accelerators. Fletcher allows developers to communicate in the Arrow format through specialized, high-performance and easy-to-use hardware interfaces. Serialization overhead is prevented, and integration with over 11 high-level languages is made possible and efficient. The OpenPOWER CAPI SNAP framework is a supported platforms of Fletcher. We will go over the benefits of Apache Arrow and Fletcher and show a hands-on example.