Cloudera Data Science Workbench Scaling Guidelines

New nodes can be added and removed from a Cloudera Data Science Workbench deployment without interrupting any jobs already scheduled on existing hosts. Therefore, it is rather straightforward to increase capacity based on observed usage. At a minimum, Cloudera recommends you allocate at least 1 CPU core and 2 GB of RAM per concurrent session or job. CPU can burst above a 1 CPU core share when spare resources are available. Therefore, a 1 CPU core allocation is often adequate for light workloads. Allocating less than 2 GB of RAM can lead to out-of-memory errors for many applications.

As a general guideline, Cloudera recommends nodes with RAM between 60GB and 256GB, and between 16 and 48 cores. This provides a useful range of options for end users. SSDs are strongly recommended for application data storage.

For some data science and machine learning applications, users can collect a significant amount of data in memory within a single R or Python process, or use a significant amount of CPU resources that cannot be easily distributed into the CDH cluster. If individual users frequently run larger workloads or run workloads in parallel over long durations, increase the total resources accordingly. Understanding your users' concurrent workload requirements or observing actual usage is the best approach to scaling Cloudera Data Science Workbench.