While installing and using Apache Hadoop on the ODROID XU4 cluster is cool, my ultimate goal was to get the more modern Apache Spark application for data analysis. In this post, we will not only install Spark, but also install the Jupyter Notebook for interacting with Spark conveniently from your computer’s browser. The installation instruction here will install Saprk and run it as a stand alone cluster in combination with the HDFS service we have previously installed. Installing Spark ends up being much simpler than installing Hadoop, but I found it to be more temperamental than Hadoop. Most notably, Spark is sensitive to the different CPU core speeds of the heterogenous octal-core CPU that the XU4 uses. If the Spark processes would run on the slower cores of the CPU, the master node would think the slave processes are timing out (missing a heartbeat), in turn restarting the executors on the slave nodes. This causes very inefficient repetition of work Read More …