Using Spark Shell (CLI) in standalone mode on distributed files

Question

I am using Spark 1.3.1 in standalone mode (No YARN/HDFS involved - Only Spark) on a cluster with 3 machines. I have a dedicated node for master (no workers running on it) and 2 separate worker nodes. The cluster starts healthy, and I am just trying to test my installation by running some simple examples via spark-shell (CLI - which I started on the master machine) : I simply put a file on the localfs on the master node (workers do NOT have a copy of this file) and I simply run:

$SPARKHOME/bin/spark-shell

...

scala> val f = sc.textFile("file:///PATH/TO/LOCAL/FILE/ON/MASTER/FS/file.txt")

scala> f.count() 

and it returns the words count results correctly.

My Questions are:

1) This contradicts with what spark documentation (on using External Datasets) say as:

"If using a path on the local filesystem, the file must also be accessible at the same path on worker nodes. Either copy the file to all workers or use a network-mounted shared file system."

I am not using NFS and I did not copy the file to workers, so how does it work ? (Is it because spark-shell does NOT really launch jobs on the cluster, and does the computation locally (It is weird as I do NOT have a worker running on the node, I started shell on)

2) If I want to run SQL scripts (in standalone mode) against some large data files (which do not fit into one machine) through Spark's thrift server (like the way beeline or hiveserver2 is used in Hive) , do I need to put the files on NFS so each worker can see the whole file, or is it possible that I create chunks out of the files, and put each smaller chunk (which would fit on a single machine) on each worker, and then use multiple paths (comma separated) to pass them all to the submitted queries ?

Answer 1

The problem is that you are running the spark-shell locally. The default for running a spark-shell is as --master local[*], which will run your code locally on as many cores as you have. If you want to run against your workers, then you will need to run with the --master parameter specifying the master's entry point. If you want to see the possible options you can use with spark-shell, just type spark-shell --help

As to whether you need to put the file on each server, the short answer is yes. Something like HDFS will split it up across the nodes and the manager will handle the fetching as appropriate. I am not as familiar with NFS and if it has this capability, though