Spark was the hot topic (see “Spark Steals the Show at Strata“)  at the recent O’Reilly Strata event in San Jose, and among the many Spark-related talks and announcements was the announcement by AMPLab Sponsor Intel of their intent to focus more resources on Spark and increase their interactions with the AMPLab (Intel has been one of the key sponsors of AMPLab since the very early days).    The Datanami blog describes this announcement as well as other Spark-related news from Strata and elsewhere in this recent article:

http://www.datanami.com/2015/02/25/apache-spark-ecosystem-continues-to-build/