spark-daria VS spark-rapids

I was a Databricks user for 5 years and spent 95% of my time developing Spark code in IDEs. See the spark-daria and spark-fast-tests projects as Scala examples. I developed internal libraries with all the business logic. The Databricks notebooks would consist of a few lines of code that would invoke a function in the proprietary Spark codebase. The proprietary Spark codebase would depend on the OSS libraries I developed in parallel.

They spent a lot of effort improving the catalyst engine under the hood too and making it easier to extend and improve it in the future. Making it easy to add your own native code to Spark itself. Shameless plug of a blog post I wrote on this subject which basically reiterates what Matthew Powers, author of Spark Daria and quinn, wrote here.

I built daria (https://github.com/MrPowers/spark-daria) to make it easier to write Spark and spark-fast-tests (https://github.com/MrPowers/spark-fast-tests) to provide a good testing workflow.

quinn (https://github.com/MrPowers/quinn) and chispa (https://github.com/MrPowers/chispa) are the PySpark equivalents.

Built bebe (https://github.com/MrPowers/bebe) to expose the Spark Catalyst expressions that aren't exposed to the Scala / Python APIs.

Also build spark-sbt.g8 to create a Spark project with a single command: https://github.com/MrPowers/spark-sbt.g8

I've built popular PySpark (quinn, chispa) and Scala Spark (spark-daria, spark-fast-tests) libraries.

His newer project, Ballista, was also donated to Apache Arrow. I hope to get the Rust skills to collaborate with him on open source work someday too. He's also doing really cool work on spark-rapids FYI.

The spark-rapids project allows one to run multi-GPU ETL workloads on a Spark cluster. https://github.com/NVIDIA/spark-rapids In such a setup, the GPU nodes are part of the Spark cluster. Multi-GPU nodes are viable, although an executor is currently limited to a single GPU.

So, in my day job at NVIDIA, I work on the RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark, which is an open-source plugin that provides GPU-acceleration for ETL workloads, leveraging the RAPIDS cuDF GPU DataFrame library.