Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs), a distributed memory abstraction that lets programmers perform in-memory computations on large clusters in a fault-tolerant manner. RDDs are motivated by two types of applications that current computing frameworks handle inefficiently: iterative algorithms and interactive data mining tools. In both cases, keeping data in memory can improve performance by an order of magnitude. To achieve fault tolerance efficiently, RDDs provide a restricted form of shared memory, based on coarsegrained transformations rather than fine-grained updates to shared state. However, we show that RDDs are expressive enough to capture a wide class of computations, including recent specialized programming models for iterative jobs, such as Pregel, and new applications that these models do not capture.
Formally, an RDD is a read-only, partitioned collection of records. RDDs can only be created through deterministic operations on either (1) data in stable storage or (2) other RDDs. We call these operations transformations to differentiate them from other operations on RDDs. Examples of transformations include map, filter, and join.2 RDDs do not need to be materialized at all times. Instead, an RDD has enough information about how it was derived from other datasets (its lineage) to compute its partitions from data in stable storage. This is a powerful property: in essence, a program cannot reference an RDD that it cannot reconstruct after a failure. Finally, users can control two other aspects of RDDs: persistence and partitioning. Users can indicate which RDDs they will reuse and choose a storage strategy for them (e.g., in-memory storage). They can also ask that an RDD’s elements be partitioned across machines based on a key in each record. This is useful for placement optimizations, such as ensuring that two datasets that will be joined together are hash-partitioned in the same way. … Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDD,RDDS)