How can I run Spark on a cluster?

You can use either the standalone deploy mode, which only needs Java to be installed on each node, or the Mesos and YARN cluster managers. If you'd like to run on Amazon EC2, AMPLab provides EC2 scripts to automatically launch a cluster.

Note that you can also run Spark locally (possibly on multiple cores) without any special setup by just passing local[N] as the master URL, where N is the number of parallel threads you want.