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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-use APIs.
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Sewak et al. (2015) studied this question.
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