What is Spark Parallelize?

Parallelize is a method to create an RDD from an existing collection. Parallelized collections are created by calling JavaSparkContext’s parallelize method on an existing Collection in your driver program. The elements of the collection are copied to form a distributed dataset that can be operated on in parallel.

List<Integer> data = Arrays.asList(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);

JavaRDD<Integer> distData = sc.parallelize(data);