Getting access to Spark cluster pre-Spark 2.0

This is a pre-Spark 2.0 recipe, but it will be helpful for developers who want to quickly compare and contrast the cluster access for porting pre-Spark 2.0 programs to Spark 2.0's new paradigm.

How to do it...

1. Start a new project in IntelliJ or in an IDE of your choice. Make sure that the necessary JAR files are included.

2. Set up the package location where the program will reside:

package spark.ml.cookbook.chapter4

3. Import the necessary packages for SparkContext to get access to the cluster:

import org.apache.spark.{SparkConf, SparkContext}

4. Create Spark's configuration and SparkContext so we can have access to the cluster:

val conf = new SparkConf()
.setAppName("MyAccessSparkClusterPre20")
.setMaster("local[4]") // if cluster setMaster("spark://MasterHostIP:7077")
.set("spark.sql.warehouse.dir", ".")

val sc = new SparkContext(conf)

The preceding code utilizes the setMaster() function to set the cluster master location. As you can see, we are running the...