[Beowulf] Beowulf Cluster VS Hadoop/Spark

[Jonathan Aquilina]

Thanks John for your reply. Very interesting food for thought here. What
I do understand between hadoop and spark is that spark is intended, i
could be wrong here, as a replacement to hadoop as it performs better
and faster then hadoop. 

Is spark also java based? I never thought java to be so high performant.
I know when i started learning to program in java (java6) it was slow
and clunky. Wouldnt it be better to stick with a pure beowulf cluster
and build yoru apps in c or c++ something that is closer to the machine
language then the use of an interpreted language such as java? I think
where I fall short to understand is how with hadoop and spark have they
made java so quick compared to a compiled language.

On 2016-12-30 08:47, John Hanks wrote:

> This often gets presented as an either/or proposition and it's really not. We happily use SLURM to schedule the setup, run and teardown of spark clusters. At the end of the day it's all software, even the kernel and OS. The big secret of HPC is that in a job scheduler we have an amazingly powerful tool to manage resources. Once you are scheduling spark clusters, hadoop clusters, VMs as jobs, containers, long running web services, ...., you begin to feel sorry for those poor "cloud" people trapped in buzzword land. 
> 
> But, directly to your question what we are learning as we dive deeper into spark (interest in hadoop here seems to be minimal and fading) is that it is just as hard or maybe harder to tune for than MPI and the people who want to use it tend to have a far looser grasp of how to tune it than those using MPI. In the short term I think it is beneficial as a sysadmin to spend some time learning the inner squishy bits to compensate for that. A simple wordcount example or search can show that wc and grep can often outperform spark and it takes some experience to understand when a particular approach is the better one for a given problem. (Where better is measured by efficiency, not by the number of cool new technical toys were employed :) 
> 
> jbh 
> 
> On Fri, Dec 30, 2016, 9:32 AM Jonathan Aquilina <jaquilina at eagleeyet.net> wrote: 
> 
>> Hi All, 
>> 
>> Seeing the new activity about new clusters for 2017, this sparked a thought in my mind here. Beowulf Cluster vs hadoop/spark 
>> 
>> In this day and age given that there is the technology with hadoop and spark to crunch large data sets, why build a cluster of pc's instead of use something like hadoop/spark? 
>> 
>> Happy New Year 
>> 
>> Jonathan Aquilina 
>> 
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