Kick-off meetup: Intro to Apache Spark by Databricks

Apache Spark (http://spark.apache.org/) has quickly grown to be one of the most active projects in big data, with more contributors in the past year than Hadoop. In this talk, we’ll introduce you to the core concepts behind the engine, recent additions, and where it’s going next. While the Spark engine is designed for ease of use and speed, its most unique strength is generality, in that it can efficiently support and combine many workloads that usually required separate engines (e.g. MapReduce, SQL and machine learning). We’ll show how we are taking advantage of this strength with higher-level libraries built on Spark like Shark for SQL, MLib for machine learning, and Spark Streaming.

Speaker: Andy Konwinski, Databricks

Andy is a cofounder of Databricks (http://databricks.com). Before that, he was a PhD student and then Postdoc in computer science in the AMPLab (http://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu) at the University of California, Berkeley. He has focused on large scale distributed computing systems, such as those used by web companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo!

In particular, he is interested in resource management, scheduling, and rapid application development in cluster environments. He has worked on scheduling in Hadoop and was one of the creators of Apache Mesos (http://mesos.apache.org), a cluster scheduling system that has been adopted by Twitter as their private cloud platform. He has also worked with systems engineers and researchers at Google on Omega, Google's next generation cluster scheduling system.

This will be a joint event with https://www.meetup.com/DataScience/events/176155552/ and https://www.meetup.com/PolyglotVancouver/ .

A second talk on NLP on Conversational Data by Dr. Yashar Mehdad (http://mehdad.net/) will follow. Special thanks to Tavis Rudd, Charles Illiya Krempeaux and Hootsuite for co-organizing and hosting this meetup.

Schedule

• 6:00PM Doors are open, feel free to mingle

• 6:20 Presentation starts

• 8:00 Off to a nearby watering hole (Mr. Brownstone?) for a pint, food, and/or breakout discussions

Getting There

By transit there a number of high frequency buses (check Google Maps or the Translink site for your particular case) that will get you there. For the drivers, there is a fair bit of street parking (free and pay) in the area, especially after 6.