MapReduce and Spark have been introduced to ease the task of developing big data programs and applications. However, the jobs in these frameworks are roughly defined and packaged as executable jars without any functionality being exposed or described. This means that deployed jobs are not natively composable and reusable for subsequent development. Besides, it also hampers the ability for applying optimizations on the data flow of job sequences and pipelines. The Hierarchically Distributed Data Matrix (HDM) which is a functional, strongly-typed data representation for writing composable big data applications. Along with HDM, a runtime framework is provided to support the execution, integration and management of HDM applications on distributed infrastructures. Based on the functional data dependency graph of HDM, multiple optimizations are applied to improve the performance of executing HDM jobs. The experimental results show that our optimizations can achieve improvements between 10% to 30% of the Job-Completion-Time and clustering time for different types of applications when compared
