IBM will commit more than 3,500 of its researchers and developers to Spark-related projects and promised a Spark Technology Center in San Francisco, California where data science and developers can work with IBM designers and architects.

Spark began life in as a project at UC Berkeley in California, quickly delivering in-memory performance as much as 100 times that of the MapReduce framework that originally underpinned Apache Hadoop. Hadoop has moved on since then, to adopt other — faster and more flexible — ways of working.

Read More: https://bigdata98.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/ibm-backs-apache-spark-for-big-data-applications/