I haven’t posted an update to my data analysis projects in a while. Partly because my day job has been a bit busy lately, and partly because what time I do have for my recreational coding has been taken up by a problem I was experiencing with Apache Spark. I started have stability problems on my ODROID XU4 cluster. I didn’t fully understand the cause at first, thinking for the longest time it was my own code. In the end, it proved to be a bug in spark, or more specifically, an incompatibility between Spark’s memory management and the ARM71 platform of my ODROID XU4 cluster. The issue has to do with how some CPUs operate on double floating point values. These CPUs, including the 32-bit ARM71 CPU found in the ODROID XU4, requires that when the CPU operates on a double floating point value the 8 bytes of memory used to contain the value should be aligned to 8 byte Read More …