[mwexler]

Always nice to have some context. Spark is a distributed computing framework, akin to Hadoop in delivering MapReduce style processing, but with some uniquely capable additional features. It was originally somewhat scala-centric (built on scala), but is now branching out.

From the docs: "Spark is a MapReduce-like cluster computing framework designed for low-latency iterative jobs and interactive use from an interpreter. It provides clean, language-integrated APIs in Scala and Java, with a rich array of parallel operators. Spark can run on top of the Apache Mesos cluster manager, Hadoop YARN, Amazon EC2, or without an independent resource manager (“standalone mode”)."