Spark on yarn concept understanding

We are running spark jobs on YARN (we use HDP 2.2).

We don't have spark installed on the cluster. We only added the Spark assembly jar to the HDFS.

For example to run the Pi example:

./bin/spark-submit \
  --verbose \
  --class org.apache.spark.examples.SparkPi \
  --master yarn-cluster \
  --conf spark.yarn.jar=hdfs://master:8020/spark/spark-assembly-1.3.1-hadoop2.6.0.jar \
  --num-executors 2 \
  --driver-memory 512m \
  --executor-memory 512m \
  --executor-cores 4 \
  hdfs://master:8020/spark/spark-examples-1.3.1-hadoop2.6.0.jar 100

--conf spark.yarn.jar=hdfs://master:8020/spark/spark-assembly-1.3.1-hadoop2.6.0.jar - This config tell the yarn from were to take the spark assembly. If you don't use it, it will upload the jar from were you run spark-submit.

About your second question: The client node doesn't not need Hadoop installed. It only needs the configuration files. You can copy the directory from your cluster to your client.