  The Data Science domain has expanded monumentally in both research and
industry communities during the past decade, predominantly owing to the Big
Data revolution. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are
bringing more complexities to data engineering applications, which are now
integrated into data processing pipelines to process terabytes of data.
Typically, a significant amount of time is spent on data preprocessing in these
pipelines, and hence improving its e fficiency directly impacts the overall
pipeline performance. The community has recently embraced the concept of
Dataframes as the de-facto data structure for data representation and
manipulation. However, the most widely used serial Dataframes today (R, pandas)
experience performance limitations while working on even moderately large data
sets. We believe that there is plenty of room for improvement by taking a look
at this problem from a high-performance computing point of view. In a prior
publication, we presented a set of parallel processing patterns for distributed
dataframe operators and the reference runtime implementation, Cylon [1]. In
this paper, we are expanding on the initial concept by introducing a cost model
for evaluating the said patterns. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of
Cylon on the ORNL Summit supercomputer.
