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Install, Configure, and Run Spark on Top of a Hadoop YARN Cluster

Updated by Linode Contributed by Florent Houbart

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What is Spark?

Spark is a general purpose cluster computing system. It can deploy and run parallel applications on clusters ranging from a single node to thousands of distributed nodes. Spark was originally designed to run Scala applications, but also supports Java, Python and R.

Install, Configure and Run Spark on top of a YARN cluster

Spark can run as a standalone cluster manager, or by taking advantage of dedicated cluster management frameworks like Apache Hadoop YARN or Apache Mesos.

Before You Begin

  1. Follow our guide on how to install and configure a three-node Hadoop cluster to set up your YARN cluster. The master node (HDFS NameNode and YARN ResourceManager) is called node-master and the slave nodes (HDFS DataNode and YARN NodeManager) are called node1 and node2.

    Run the commands in this guide from node-master unless otherwise specified.

  2. Be sure you have a hadoop user that can access all cluster nodes with SSH keys without a password.

  3. Note the path of your Hadoop installation. This guide assumes it is installed in /home/hadoop/hadoop. If it is not, adjust the path in the examples accordingly.

  4. Run jps on each of the nodes to confirm that HDFS and YARN are running. If they are not, start the services with:

    start-dfs.sh
start-yarn.sh
Note
This guide is written for a non-root user. Commands that require elevated privileges are prefixed with sudo. If you’re not familiar with the sudo command, see the Users and Groups guide.

Download and Install Spark Binaries

Spark binaries are available from the Apache Spark download page. Adjust each command below to match the correct version number.

  1. Get the download URL from the Spark download page, download it, and uncompress it.

    For Spark 2.2.0 with Hadoop 2.7 or later, log on node-master as the hadoop user, and run:

    cd /home/hadoop
wget https://d3kbcqa49mib13.cloudfront.net/spark-2.2.0-bin-hadoop2.7.tgz
tar -xvf spark-2.2.0-bin-hadoop2.7.tgz
mv spark-2.2.0-bin-hadoop2.7 spark

  2. Add the Spark binaries directory to your PATH. Edit /home/hadoop/.profile and add the following line:

    For Debian/Ubuntu systems:

    /home/hadoop/.profile 
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    PATH=/home/hadoop/spark/bin:$PATH

    For RedHat/Fedora/CentOS systems:

    /home/hadoop/.profile 
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    pathmunge /home/hadoop/spark/bin

Integrate Spark with YARN

To communicate with the YARN Resource Manager, Spark needs to be aware of your Hadoop configuration. This is done via the HADOOP_CONF_DIR environment variable. The SPARK_HOME variable is not mandatory, but is useful when submitting Spark jobs from the command line.

  1. Edit the hadoop user profile /home/hadoop/.profile and add the following lines:

    /home/hadoop/.profile 
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    export HADOOP_CONF_DIR=/home/hadoop/hadoop/etc/hadoop
export SPARK_HOME=/home/hadoop/spark
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/hadoop/hadoop/lib/native:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

  2. Restart your session by logging out and logging in again.

  3. Rename the spark default template config file:

    mv $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf.template $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf

  4. Edit $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf and set spark.master to yarn:

    $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf 
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    spark.master    yarn

Spark is now ready to interact with your YARN cluster.

Understand Client and Cluster Mode

Spark jobs can run on YARN in two modes: cluster mode and client mode. Understanding the difference between the two modes is important for choosing an appropriate memory allocation configuration, and to submit jobs as expected.

A Spark job consists of two parts: Spark Executors that run the actual tasks, and a Spark Driver that schedules the Executors.

  • Cluster mode: everything runs inside the cluster. You can start a job from your laptop and the job will continue running even if you close your computer. In this mode, the Spark Driver is encapsulated inside the YARN Application Master.

  • Client mode the Spark driver runs on a client, such as your laptop. If the client is shut down, the job fails. Spark Executors still run on the cluster, and to schedule everything, a small YARN Application Master is created.

Client mode is well suited for interactive jobs, but applications will fail if the client stops. For long running jobs, cluster mode is more appropriate.

Configure Memory Allocation

Allocation of Spark containers to run in YARN containers may fail if memory allocation is not configured properly. For nodes with less than 4G RAM, the default configuration is not adequate and may trigger swapping and poor performance, or even the failure of application initialization due to lack of memory.

Be sure to understand how Hadoop YARN manages memory allocation before editing Spark memory settings so that your changes are compatible with your YARN cluster’s limits.

Note
See the memory allocation section of the Install and Configure a 3-Node Hadoop Cluster guide for more details on managing your YARN cluster’s memory.

Give Your YARN Containers Maximum Allowed Memory

If the memory requested is above the maximum allowed, YARN will reject creation of the container, and your Spark application won’t start.

  1. Get the value of yarn.scheduler.maximum-allocation-mb in $HADOOP_CONF_DIR/yarn-site.xml. This is the maximum allowed value, in MB, for a single container.

  2. Make sure that values for Spark memory allocation, configured in the following section, are below the maximum.

This guide will use a sample value of 1536 for yarn.scheduler.maximum-allocation-mb. If your settings are lower, adjust the samples with your configuration.

Configure the Spark Driver Memory Allocation in Cluster Mode

In cluster mode, the Spark Driver runs inside YARN Application Master. The amount of memory requested by Spark at initialization is configured either in spark-defaults.conf, or through the command line.

From spark-defaults.conf

  • Set the default amount of memory allocated to Spark Driver in cluster mode via spark.driver.memory (this value defaults to 1G). To set it to 512MB, edit the file:

    $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf 
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    spark.driver.memory    512m

From the Command Line

  • Use the --driver-memory parameter to specify the amount of memory requested by spark-submit. See the following section about application submission for examples.

    Note
    Values given from the command line will override whatever has been set in spark-defaults.conf.

Configure the Spark Application Master Memory Allocation in Client Mode

In client mode, the Spark driver will not run on the cluster, so the above configuration will have no effect. A YARN Application Master still needs to be created to schedule the Spark executor, and you can set its memory requirements.

Set the amount of memory allocated to Application Master in client mode with spark.yarn.am.memory (default to 512M)

$SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf 
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spark.yarn.am.memory    512m

This value can not be set from the command line.

Configure Spark Executors’ Memory Allocation

The Spark Executors’ memory allocation is calculated based on two parameters inside $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf:

  • spark.executor.memory: sets the base memory used in calculation
  • spark.yarn.executor.memoryOverhead: is added to the base memory. It defaults to 7% of base memory, with a minimum of 384MB
Note
Make sure that Executor requested memory, including overhead memory, is below the YARN container maximum size, otherwise the Spark application won’t initialize.

Example: for spark.executor.memory of 1Gb , the required memory is 1024+384=1408MB. For 512MB, the required memory will be 512+384=896MB

To set executor memory to 512MB, edit $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf and add the following line:

$SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf 
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spark.executor.memory          512m

How to Submit a Spark Application to the YARN Cluster

Applications are submitted with the spark-submit command. The Spark installation package contains sample applications, like the parallel calculation of Pi, that you can run to practice starting Spark jobs.

To run the sample Pi calculation, use the following command:

spark-submit --deploy-mode client \
               --class org.apache.spark.examples.SparkPi \
               $SPARK_HOME/examples/jars/spark-examples_2.11-2.2.0.jar 10

The first parameter, --deploy-mode, specifies which mode to use, client or cluster.

To run the same application in cluster mode, replace --deploy-mode clientwith --deploy-mode cluster.

Monitor Your Spark Applications

When you submit a job, Spark Driver automatically starts a web UI on port 4040 that displays information about the application. However, when execution is finished, the Web UI is dismissed with the application driver and can no longer be accessed.

Spark provides a History Server that collects application logs from HDFS and displays them in a persistent web UI. The following steps will enable log persistence in HDFS:

  1. Edit $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf and add the following lines to enable Spark jobs to log in HDFS:

    $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf 
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    spark.eventLog.enabled  true
spark.eventLog.dir hdfs://node-master:9000/spark-logs

  2. Create the log directory in HDFS:

    hdfs dfs -mkdir /spark-logs

  3. Configure History Server related properties in $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf:

    $SPARK_HOME/conf/spark-defaults.conf 
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    spark.history.provider            org.apache.spark.deploy.history.FsHistoryProvider
spark.history.fs.logDirectory     hdfs://node-master:9000/spark-logs
spark.history.fs.update.interval  10s
spark.history.ui.port             18080

    You may want to use a different update interval than the default 10s. If you specify a bigger interval, you will have some delay between what you see in the History Server and the real time status of your application. If you use a shorter interval, you will increase I/O on the HDFS.

  4. Run the History Server:

    $SPARK_HOME/sbin/start-history-server.sh

  5. Repeat steps from previous section to start a job with spark-submit that will generate some logs in the HDFS:

  6. Access the History Server by navigating to http://node-master:18080 in a web browser:

    Screenshot of Spark History Server

Run the Spark Shell

The Spark shell provides an interactive way to examine and work with your data.

  1. Put some data into HDFS for analysis. This example uses the text of Alice In Wonderland from the Gutenberg project:

    cd /home/hadoop
wget -O alice.txt https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-0.txt
hdfs dfs -mkdir inputs
hdfs dfs -put alice.txt inputs

  2. Start the Spark shell:

    spark-shell

var input = spark.read.textFile("inputs/alice.txt")
// Count the number of non blank lines
input.filter(line => line.length()>0).count()

The Scala Spark API is beyond the scope of this guide. You can find the official documentation on Official Apache Spark documentation.

Where to Go Next ?

Now that you have a running Spark cluster, you can:

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

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This guide is published under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license.