Spark Gets GPU in the Lab

I've blogged about BIDMach before (Single GPU-Powered Node 4x Faster Than 50-node Spark Cluster), which is a much newer project from AMPLab than Spark. But BIDMach, although it has plans for cluster operation, apparently does not have it yet.

Just today, Alexander Ulanov from HP demonstrated GPU operation on a single node of Spark, and the performance is on par with BIDMach. So hopefully Spark will be a path in the foreseeable future toward easy-to-use machine learning on a GPU-powered cluster.

In addition to the Apache Spark Dev mailing list thread, the other place progress can be tracked is Spark Jira ticket SPARK-3785.