Apache Spark has rocked the big data landscape, becoming the largest open source big data community with over 750 contributors from more than 200 organizations. Spark's core tenants of speed, ease of use, and its unified programming model fit neatly with the high performance, scalable, and manageable characteristics of modern Java runtimes. In this talk Tim Ellison, a JVM developer at IBM, shows some of the unique Java 8 capabilities in the JIT compiler, fast networking, serialization techniques, and GPU off-loading that deliver the ultimate big data platform for solving business problems. Tim will demonstrate how solutions, previously infeasible with regular Java programming, become possible with this high performance Spark core runtime, enabling you to solve problems smarter and faster.