/**
* A Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD), the basic abstraction in Spark. Represents an immutable,
* partitioned collection of elements that can be operated on in parallel. This class contains the
* basic operations available on all RDDs, such as `map`, `filter`, and `persist`. In addition,
* [[org.apache.spark.rdd.PairRDDFunctions]] contains operations available only on RDDs of key-value
* pairs, such as `groupByKey` and `join`;
* [[org.apache.spark.rdd.DoubleRDDFunctions]] contains operations available only on RDDs of
* Doubles; and
* [[org.apache.spark.rdd.SequenceFileRDDFunctions]] contains operations available on RDDs that
* can be saved as SequenceFiles.
* All operations are automatically available on any RDD of the right type (e.g. RDD[(Int, Int)]
* through implicit.
*
* Internally, each RDD is characterized by five main properties:
*
* - A list of partitions
* - A functionforcomputingeachsplit
* - AlistofdependenciesonotherRDDs
* - Optionally, aPartitionerforkey-valueRDDs(e.g. to say that the RDD is hash-partitioned)
* - Optionally, a list of preferred locations to compute each split on (e.g. block locations for
* an HDFS file)
*
* All of the scheduling and execution in Spark is done based on these methods, allowing each RDD
* to implement its own way of computing itself. Indeed, users can implement custom RDDs (e.g. for
* reading data from a new storage system) by overriding these functions. Please refer to the
* [[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~matei/papers/2012/nsdi_spark.pdf Spark paper]]for more details
* on RDD internals.
*/