spark-introduction | presentation given at the IBM Data Science | Machine Learning library

One pass computations is when you are reading the dataset once whereas multipass computations is when a dataset is read once from the disk and multiple computations or operation are done on the same dataset. Apache Spark processing framework allows you to read data once which is then cached into memory and then we can perform multi pass computations on the data. These computations can be done on the dataset very quickly because the data is present into memory of the machine and apache spark does not need to read the data again from the disk which helps us to save lot of input output operations time. As per the definition of apache spark it is an in memory processing framework which means the data and transformation on which the computation is done is present in memory itself.