GeoSpark: a cluster computing framework for processing large-scale spatial data

Abstract

This paper introduces GeoSpark an in-memory cluster computing framework for processing large-scale spatial data. GeoSpark consists of three layers: Apache Spark Layer, Spatial RDD Layer and Spatial Query Processing Layer. Apache Spark Layer provides basic Spark functionalities that include loading / storing data to disk as well as regular RDD operations. Spatial RDD Layer consists of three novel Spatial Resilient Distributed Datasets (SRDDs) which extend regular Apache Spark RDDs to support geometrical and spatial objects. GeoSpark provides a geometrical operations library that accesses Spatial RDDs to perform basic geometrical operations (e.g., Overlap, Intersect). System users can leverage the newly defined SRDDs to effectively develop spatial data processing programs in Spark. The Spatial Query Processing Layer efficiently executes spatial query processing algorithms (e.g., Spatial Range, Join, KNN query) on SRDDs. GeoSpark also allows users to create a spatial index (e.g., R-tree, Quad-tree) that boosts spatial data processing performance in each SRDD partition. Preliminary experiments show that GeoSpark achieves better run time performance than its Hadoop-based counterparts (e.g., SpatialHadoop).