Tag Archives: Spark

Apache Spark Future

Everyone around the internet is constantly talking about the bright future of Apache Spark. How cool it is, how innovative it is, how fast it is moving, how big its community is, how big the investments into it are, etc. But what is really hiding behind this enthusiasm of Spark adepts, and what is the real future of Apache Spark?

Predicting Apache Spark Future

In this article I show you the real data and real trends, trying to be as agnostic and unbiased as possible. This article is not affiliated with any vendor.

Continue reading

Spark Memory Management

Starting Apache Spark version 1.6.0, memory management model has changed. The old memory management model is implemented by StaticMemoryManager class, and now it is called “legacy”. “Legacy” mode is disabled by default, which means that running the same code on Spark 1.5.x and 1.6.0 would result in different behavior, be careful with that. For compatibility, you can enable the “legacy” model with spark.memory.useLegacyMode parameter, which is turned off by default.

Previously I have described the “legacy” model of memory management in this article about Spark Architecture almost one year ago. Also I have written an article on Spark Shuffle implementations that briefly touches memory management topic as well.

This article describes new memory management model used in Apache Spark starting version 1.6.0, which is implemented as UnifiedMemoryManager.

Continue reading

Spark Architecture: Shuffle

This is my second article about Apache Spark architecture and today I will be more specific and tell you about the shuffle, one of the most interesting topics in the overall Spark design. The previous part was mostly about general Spark architecture and its memory management. It can be accessed here. The next one is about Spark memory management and it is available here.

Spark Shuffle Design

What is the shuffle in general? Imagine that you have a list of phone call detail records in a table and you want to calculate amount of calls happened each day. This way you would set the “day” as your key, and for each record (i.e. for each call) you would emit “1” as a value. After this you would sum up values for each key, which would be an answer to your question – total amount of records for each day. But when you store the data across the cluster, how can you sum up the values for the same key stored on different machines? The only way to do so is to make all the values for the same key be on the same machine, after this you would be able to sum them up.

Continue reading