Before revision: Though the big data benchmark suites like BigDataBench and CloudSuite have been used in architecture and system researches, we have not yet answered the fundamental issue-- what are abstractions of frequently-appearing units of computation in big data analytics, which we call big data dwarfs. For the first time, we identify eight big data dwarfs, each of which captures the common requirements of each class of unit of computation  while being reasonably divorced from individual implementations  among a wide variety of big data analytics workloads .
After revision: The complexity and diversity of big data and AI workloads make understanding them difficult and challenging. This paper proposes a new approach to characterizing big data and AI workloads. We consider each big data and AI workload as a pipeline of one or more classes of unit of computations performed on different initial or intermediate data inputs. Each class of unit of computation while being reasonably divorced from individual implementations among a wide variety of big data analytics workloads .