This talk was recorded at Scala Days New York, 2016. Follow along on Twitter @scaladays and on the website for more information http://scaladays.org/. Abstract: Scala is the fastest expanding language in the datacenter, big data, and cloud computing. However the lack of standardized Big Data Scala benchmarks has hindered extended performance improvements related to the datacenter. In this talk we will present a newly developed Scala Big Data Benchmark based on learnings from TCPx-BB, SparkBench, and genomic (GATK/ADAM) workloads. We'll also introduce the most impacting big data-related performance improvements for Scala developed by our group.