Apache systemML is IBM's open source project that interfaces with the Spark Context, allowing for simple expression of numerical algorithms. This is an ideal platform for Data Science, especially when there is an interest in specializing machine learning algorithms for specific challenges. The platform is extremely flexible, and enables complex numerical algorithms to be expressed in a simple and readable syntax, while preserving scalability for heavy duty computations. The parallelization details are optimized through the powerful cost based optimization engine in systemML.