Apache Spark is an execution engine that besides working as an isolated distributed, in-memory computing engine also offers close integration with Hadoop’s distributed file system (HDFS). Apache Spark's underlying appeal is in providing a unified framework to create sophisticated applications involving workloads. It unifies multiple workloads, handles unstructured data very well and has easy-to...

Apache Spark is an open-source cluster computing framework. It has emerged as the next generation big data processing engine, overtaking Hadoop MapReduce which helped ignite the big data revolution. Spark maintains MapReduce’s linear scalability and fault tolerance, but extends it in a few important ways: it is much faster (100 times faster for certain applications), much easier to program in d...

Upon activation, mammalian eggs release billions of zinc ions in an exocytotic event termed the "zinc spark." The zinc spark is dependent on and occurs coordinately with intracellular calcium transients, which are tightly associated with embryonic development. Thus, we hypothesized that the zinc spark represents an early extracellular physicochemical marker of the developmental potential of the...

Simulations of forced ignition of non-premixed laminar counterflow flames are used to study the effect of strain rate on ignition success. A one dimensional calculation is performed, using detailed methane chemical kinetics and treating the spark as an instantaneous heat release in an inert mixing layer. Ignition success depends on the mixture composition at the spark location, resulting in lea...

AIMS The cardiac ryanodine receptor (RyR) Ca(2+) release channel homotetramer harbours approximately 21 potentially redox-sensitive cysteine residues on each subunit and may act as a sensor for reactive oxygen species (ROS), linking ROS homeostasis to the regulation of Ca(2+) signalling. In cardiac myocytes, arrayed RyRs or Ca(2+) release units are packed in the close proximity of mitochondria,...

Guidelines for the development of software in safety-critical systems usually restrict programming languages, removing features that are unsafe and/or hard to thoroughly test and certify. There are also recommendations and demands in newer guidelines for the use of formal methods, as a way to achieve high assurance software. SPARK is a strict subset of Ada that was designed to have unambiguous ...

Although the MapReduce programming model has so far been highly successful, not all applications are well suited to this model. Spark bridges this gap by providing seamless support for iterative and interactive jobs that are hard to express using the acyclic data flow model pioneered by MapReduce. While benchmarking Spark, we identified that the default broadcast mechanism implemented in the Sp...