IBM is making a big investment in Apache Spark. The company announced plans to assign 3500 researchers to work on the open source big data project. ?I like to think of Spark as the analytics operating system,? said Rob Thomas, an IBM vice president. ?Our belief is anyone using data in the future is going to be leveraging Spark. It allows universal access to data.? Thomas also noted that Spark is the fastest-growing open source project in history.
At the same time, IBM also announced plans to open source its SystemML machine learning technology. It also said it would work closely with Databricks, the company focused on Spark development, and that it will include Spark in its analytics products.
Late last week, Spark 1.4 was released with support for R and Python 3.
