Apache Mahout Samsara: The Quick Start

Last week the newest Apache Mahout 0.10 was released. One of the new features it has is a new math environment called “Samsara”, or Mahout Scala/Spark Bindings.

Samsara is a Linear Algebra library for Mahout. It’s written in Scala, which makes it possible to use operator overloading and it features nice R-like or Matlab-like syntax for basic Linear Algebra operations. For example, matrix multiplication is just X %*% Y. What is more, these operations can be distributed and run by an executing environment - currently by Apache Spark.

In this article we will see how to quickly set up a basic skeleton project and then we’ll try to do some very simple analysis on a 200 MB dataset.