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You're reading from  Frank Kane's Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python

Product typeBook
Published inJun 2017
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781787287945
Edition1st Edition
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Frank Kane
Frank Kane
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Frank Kane

Frank Kane has spent nine years at Amazon and IMDb, developing and managing the technology that automatically delivers product and movie recommendations to hundreds of millions of customers all the time. He holds 17 issued patents in the fields of distributed computing, data mining, and machine learning. In 2012, Frank left to start his own successful company, Sundog Software, which focuses on virtual reality environment technology and teaches others about big data analysis.
Read more about Frank Kane

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What is Spark?


According to Apache, Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. This is actually a really good summary of what it's all about. If you have a really massive dataset that can represent anything - weblogs, genomics data, you name it - Spark can slice and dice that data up. It can distribute the processing among a huge cluster of computers, taking a data analysis problem that's just too big to run on one machine and divide and conquer it by splitting it up among multiple machines.

Spark is scalable

The way that Spark scales data analysis problems is, it runs on top of a cluster manager, so your actual Spark scripts are just everyday scripts written in Python, Java, or Scala; they behave just like any other script. Your "driver program" is what we call it, and it will run on your desktop or on one master node of your cluster. However, under the hood, when you run it, Spark knows how to take the work and actually farm it out to different computers on your...

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Frank Kane's Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python
Published in: Jun 2017Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781787287945

Author (1)

author image
Frank Kane

Frank Kane has spent nine years at Amazon and IMDb, developing and managing the technology that automatically delivers product and movie recommendations to hundreds of millions of customers all the time. He holds 17 issued patents in the fields of distributed computing, data mining, and machine learning. In 2012, Frank left to start his own successful company, Sundog Software, which focuses on virtual reality environment technology and teaches others about big data analysis.
Read more about Frank Kane