Databricks Announces Academic Partners Program

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Aug. 11 — Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark, today announced the launch of the Databricks Academic Partners Program to provide academics and researchers with free access to the company’s cloud-based platform. The program will offer professors and students a hands-on experience when creating Spark applications while providing academic researchers with tools to accelerate research processes. By leveraging Amazon’s AWS in Education grants program, academics can also apply for grants to cover their AWS costs associated with using Databricks.

With the rising demand for adoption of Apache Spark, the Academic Partners Program will offer students and researchers the chance to develop applications for manipulating, exploring and visualizing data in a supervised setting. Users can quickly and seamlessly deploy course-specific libraries, manage clusters and set up access controls to enable students to work collaboratively. Databricks also supports easy integration with existing research project development infrastructure via GitHub integration, allowing students to focus on their research instead of managing a complex software execution environment.

Instructors from Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, University of California San Diego, University of California Los Angeles and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid), are already developing courses using Databricks. UCLA specifically is employing machine learning researchers to use SparkR notebooks within Databricks to develop a new family of communication-efficient methods that directly target massive and diverse datasets.

“Databricks was born from academic research and today we are giving back to the academic community with the Databricks Academic Partners Program,” said Andy Konwinski, co-founder and head of training at Databricks. “This program will offer students and researchers the comprehensive tools they need to get back to discovery and problem solving, rather than complex data wrangling.”

About Databricks 

Databricks’ vision is to dramatically simplify big data processing. It was founded by the team that created and continues to drive Apache Spark, a powerful open source data processing engine built for sophisticated analytics, ease of use, and speed. Databricks offers a cloud platform that makes it easy to turn data into value, from ingest to production, without the hassle of managing complex infrastructure, systems and tools. Databricks is venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz and NEA. For more information, visit http://www.databricks.com.

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Source: Databricks