DevPost Blog Spark is Eating the World

Well, maybe not quite yet, at least not in the way Marc Andreesson meant it in his famous remark about software eating the world. But Spark, the analytics operating system that's steadily blowing away its big data brethren, is definitely eating the way businesses analyze their data and implement changes based on those insights.To give you a chance to AMP up your Spark skills, we just launched IBM's Apache Spark Makers Build, a global online hackathon to put Spark to work on real business problems. The winning apps will collect more than $100,000 in cash prizes, and the top three winners each receive a meeting with the judge or Spark community expert of their choice.According to Datafloq's blog, companies like Yahoo!, Conviva, and Huawei are using Spark to help them improve personalization, video streaming, real-time visualization tools, and telecom network speed. Datafloq predicts that increasingly, companies will use Spark to examine their IoT data and optimize their businesses.If you're relatively new to Spark, here are some key points:powerful open-source data analytics tool built for cluster-computingallows collections of objects to be stored in memory or disk across a clusterlets data scientists and developers work together in a unified platformenables developers to execute Python or Scala code across a cluster instead of to just one machine. Users can load data into a cluster's memory and query it repeatedly.works well with HadoopIf this is all sounding like Greek to you, we've got your back: IBM and Galvanize are hosting a community roundtable on June 6 in San Francisco, to coincide with the Spark Summit. If you don't live in the Bay Area, you can catch the Apache Spark community event via livestream. We'll also be hosting virtual mentoring sessions throughout the competition, so stay tuned.Oh and did we mention we've got baller judges from Netflix, Tesla, and Silicon Valley Data Science?Get signed up at apachespark.devpost.com.