Introduction to Big Data and Spark

This is an introductory talk for those who want to get into Big Data and learn about Spark, but don't know where to start. Spark is a fast easy-to-use general-purpose cluster computing framework for processing large datasets. It has become the most active open-source big data project. It is hotter than Hadoop was a few years ago. The talk will start with an introduction to Big Data and the challenges associated with it. Next, Mohammed will dive into Spark and talk about how it can be used to solve those challenges. In addition, he will discuss the following: a) Why Spark has set the Big Data world on fire b) Why people are replacing Hadoop MapReduce with Spark c) What kind of applications benefit from Spark d) How Spark works (high-level architecture) Finally, he will introduce the key libraries that come pre-packaged with Spark and discuss how these libraries simplify a variety of analytical tasks, including: a) Batch processing b) Interactive ad hoc analytics c) Stream processing d) Graph analytics e) Machine learning