A service-oriented infrastructure for teaching big data technologies

Abstract

The paper presents an experience in incorporating Big Data technologies into introductory parallel and distributed computing courses and building a service-oriented infrastructure to support practical exercises involving these technologies. The presented approach helped to provide a smooth practical experience for students with different technical background by enabling them to run and test their MapReduce and Spark programs on a provided Hadoop cluster via convenient web interfaces. This approach also enabled automation of routine actions related to submission of programs to a cluster and evaluation of programming assignments.