What is a task in Spark? How does the Spark worker execute the jar file?

After reading some document on http://spark.apache.org/docs/0.8.0/cluster-overview.html, I got some question that I want to clarify.

Take this example from Spark:

JavaSparkContext spark = new JavaSparkContext(
  new SparkConf().setJars("...").setSparkHome....);
JavaRDD<String> file = spark.textFile("hdfs://...");

// step1
JavaRDD<String> words =
  file.flatMap(new FlatMapFunction<String, String>() {
    public Iterable<String> call(String s) {
      return Arrays.asList(s.split(" "));
    }
  });

// step2
JavaPairRDD<String, Integer> pairs =
  words.map(new PairFunction<String, String, Integer>() {
    public Tuple2<String, Integer> call(String s) {
      return new Tuple2<String, Integer>(s, 1);
    }
  });

// step3
JavaPairRDD<String, Integer> counts =
  pairs.reduceByKey(new Function2<Integer, Integer>() {
    public Integer call(Integer a, Integer b) {
      return a + b;
    }
  });

counts.saveAsTextFile("hdfs://...");

So let's say I have 3 nodes cluster, and node 1 running as master, and the above driver program has been properly jared (say application-test.jar). So now I'm running this code on the master node and I believe right after the SparkContext being created, the application-test.jar file will be copied to the worker nodes (and each worker will create a dir for that application).

So now my question: Are step1, step2 and step3 in the example tasks that get sent over to the workers? If yes, then how does the worker execute that? Like java -cp "application-test.jar" step1 and so on?

When you create the SparkContext, each worker starts an executor. This is a separate process (JVM), and it loads your jar too. The executors connect back to your driver program. Now the driver can send them commands, like flatMap, map and reduceByKey in your example. When the driver quits, the executors shut down.

RDDs are sort of like big arrays that are split into partitions, and each executor can hold some of these partitions.

A task is a command sent from the driver to an executor by serializing your Function object. The executor deserializes the command (this is possible because it has loaded your jar), and executes it on a partition.

_{(This is a conceptual overview. I am glossing over some details, but I hope it is helpful.)}

To answer your specific question: No, a new process is not started for each step. A new process is started on each worker when the SparkContext is constructed.

To get a clear insight on how tasks are created and scheduled, we must understand how execution model works in Spark. Shortly speaking, an application in spark is executed in three steps :

1. Create RDD graph
2. Create execution plan according to the RDD graph. Stages are created in this step
3. Generate tasks based on the plan and get them scheduled across workers

In your word-count example, the RDD graph is rather simple, it's something as follows :

file -> lines -> words -> per-word count -> global word count -> output

Based on this graph, two stages are created. The stage creation rule is based on the idea to pipeline as many narrow transformations as possible. In your example, the narrow transformation finishes at per-word count. Therefore, you get two stages

1. file -> lines -> words -> per-word count
2. global word count -> output

Once stages are figured out, spark will generate tasks from stages. The first stage will create ShuffleMapTasks and the last stage will create ResultTasks because in the last stage, one action operation is included to produce results.

The number of tasks to be generated depends on how your files are distributed. Suppose that you have 3 three different files in three different nodes, the first stage will generate 3 tasks : one task per partition.

Therefore, you should not map your steps to tasks directly. A task belongs to a stage, and is related to a partition.

Usually, the number of tasks ran for a stage is exactly the number of partitions of the final RDD, but since RDDs can be shared (and hence ShuffleMapStages) their number varies depending on the RDD/stage sharing. Please refer to How DAG works under the covers in RDD?