[HiBD] Announcing the release of RDMA-Apache-Spark 0.9.3 and OSU HiBD-Benchmarks (OHB) 0.9.2

[Panda, Dhabaleswar]

The High-Performance Big Data (HiBD) team is pleased to announce the
release of RDMA-Apache-Spark 0.9.3 and OSU HiBD-Benchmarks (OHB) 0.9.2
with the following features.

* RDMA-Apache-Spark 0.9.3 (New features and enhancements compared to
  0.9.1 are marked as (NEW)):

    - Based on Apache Spark 1.5.1
    - (NEW) Built with Apache Hadoop 2.7.3
    - High-performance design with native InfiniBand and RoCE
      support at the verbs-level for Spark
        - RDMA-based data shuffle
        - SEDA-based shuffle architecture
        - (NEW) Support pre-connection, on-demand connection and
          connection sharing
        - Non-blocking and chunk-based data transfer
        - Off-JVM-heap buffer management
    - Compliant with Apache Spark 1.5.1 APIs and applications
    - (NEW) RDMA support for Spark SQL
    - (NEW) Integration with HHH in RDMA-Hadoop
    - Easily configurable for native InfiniBand, RoCE, and the
      traditional sockets based support (Ethernet and InfiniBand
      with IPoIB)
    - Tested with
        - (NEW) Mellanox InfiniBand adapters (DDR, QDR, FDR, and EDR)
        - RoCE support with Mellanox adapters
        - Various multi-core platforms
        - RAM Disks, SSDs, and HDDs

* Bug Fixes (compared to  RDMA-Apache-Spark 0.9.1) are:
    - Fix a hang issue in finalize stage

* HiBD Benchmarks 0.9.2 features (New features and enhancements
  compared to 0.9.1 release are marked as (NEW)):

    - (NEW) Micro-benchmarks for Spark
        - (NEW) GroupBy
        - (NEW) SortBy
    - Micro-benchmarks for Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
        - Sequential Write Latency (SWL) Benchmark
        - Sequential Read Latency (SRL) Benchmark
        - Random Read Latency (RRL) Benchmark
        - Sequential Write Throughput (SWT) Benchmark
        - Sequential Read Throughput (SRT) Benchmark
        - Support benchmarking
            - Apache Hadoop 1.x and 2.x HDFS
            - Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) HDFS
            - Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop (CDH) HDFS
    - Micro-benchmarks for Memcached
        - Get Latency Benchmark
        - Set Latency Benchmark
        - Mixed Get/Set Latency Benchmark
        - Non-Blocking API Latency Benchmark
        - Hybrid Memory Latency Benchmark
    - Micro-benchmarks for HBase
        - Get Latency Benchmark
        - Put Latency Benchmark

For downloading RDMA-Apache-Spark 0.9.3 and OSU HiBD-Benchmarks 0.9.2
packages, the associated user guides, please visit the following URL:

http://hibd.cse.ohio-state.edu

Sample performance numbers for RDMA-Apache-Spark using benchmarks can
be viewed by visiting the `Performance' tab of the above website.

All questions, feedback and bug reports are welcome. Please post to
the rdma-spark-discuss mailing list (rdma-spark-discuss at
cse.ohio-state.edu).

Thanks,

The High-Performance Big Data (HiBD) Team
http://hibd.cse.ohio-state.edu

PS: The number of organizations using the HiBD stacks has crossed 200
(from 28 countries). Similarly, the number of downloads from the HiBD
site has crossed 18,700.  The HiBD team would like to thank all its
users and organizations!!