Resilient distributed datasets: a fault-tolerant abstraction for in-memory cluster computing

TLDR: Resilient Distributed Datasets is presented, a distributed memory abstraction that lets programmers perform in-memory computations on large clusters in a fault-tolerant manner and is implemented in a system called Spark, which is evaluated through a variety of user applications and benchmarks.

Abstract: We present Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs), a distributed memory abstraction that lets programmers perform in-memory computations on large clusters in a fault-tolerant manner. RDDs are motivated by two types of applications that current computing frameworks handle inefficiently: iterative algorithms and interactive data mining tools. In both cases, keeping data in memory can improve performance by an order of magnitude. To achieve fault tolerance efficiently, RDDs provide a restricted form of shared memory, based on coarse-grained transformations rather than fine-grained updates to shared state. However, we show that RDDs are expressive enough to capture a wide class of computations, including recent specialized programming models for iterative jobs, such as Pregel, and new applications that these models do not capture. We have implemented RDDs in a system called Spark, which we evaluate through a variety of user applications and benchmarks.