Flare

Set your Data on Fire

Flare is a drop-in accelerator for Apache Spark that achieves order of magnitude speedups on DataFrame and SQL workloads.

Native Compilation

Spark performance has made impressive progress thanks to Catalyst and Tungsten, but there is still a significant gap towards best-of-breed query engines or hand-written low-level C code.

Flare closes this gap by compiling Catalyst query plans to native code.

Mechanical Sympathy

Flare’s low-level implementation takes full advantage of native execution, using techniques such as NUMA-aware data layout and scheduling to leverage mechanical sympathy, and to bring execution closer to the metal than what is possible with current JVM-based techniques.

Big Memory and Many Cores

Modern server-class hardware provides memory in the TB range, and dozens of CPU cores. Such powerful machines are readily available, for example as X1 instances on Amazon EC2 or for purchase at Dell.

They are as powerful as a small cluster, but do not require network communication or fault tolerance, and they consume less energy, which makes them cheaper to operate.

While Spark was primarily designed for scaling out on clusters, Flare makes scaling up on server-class hardware an attractive alternative, in terms of performance, and also in terms of operating costs.

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