What's new with Apache Spark? An evening with Paco Nathan.

UPDATE: Our good friends at Thoughtworks have offered their space to host the meeting in the Aon Building (the very big White one). If you are at Mesoscon/Linuxcon, cross the river using the Columbia St. bridge (stay on the East side) and take the stairs at the other end to the upper road deck. Continue down "upper" Columbia to the North or South entrance of the building. You'll need a photo id for security. (Note: dinner won't be provided so eat beforehand.)

Databricks Spark evangelist Paco Nathan (http://liber118.com/pxn/) is in town to teach is Hands-on Introduction to Apache Spark (http://spark-workshop-chicago.eventbrite.com/). We asked Paco if he would take an evening to share with us the latest news on Apache Spark. He agreed.

Paco will be discussing the current state of Spark -- including some nifty tricks you might not have seen -- as well as share a bit about where Spark is going. Additional details to follow. This is a talk not to be missed.

About Apache Spark

Apache Spark is an open-source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley. Spark fits into the Hadoop open-source community, building on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). However, Spark is not tied to the two-stage MapReduce paradigm, and promises performance up to 100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce for certain applications. Spark provides primitives for in-memory cluster computing that allows user programs to load data into a cluster's memory and query it repeatedly, making it well suited to machine learning algorithms.

About Paco Nathan

Paco Nathan (http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/1927), is a "player/coach" who has led innovative Data teams building large-scale apps for several years. Expertise in distributed systems, machine learning, cloud computing, functional programming. Paco is an O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/1927) author -- with a focus on Enterprise data workflows and math literacy among execs, plus a keen interest in Ag+Data (http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/04/agdata.html) --Apache Spark (http://spark.apache.org/) open source evangelist with Databricks (http://databricks.com/), and an advisor for Amplify Partners (http://www.amplifypartners.com/). He received his BS Math Sci and MS Comp Sci degrees from Stanford University, and has 30+ years technology industry experience ranging from Bell Labs to early-stage start-ups.