apache/incubator-spark — pull request #578 by mengxr (2014-02-10 23:29:19+00:00)
Title: Adding assignRanks and assignUniqueIds to RDD

Assign ranks to an ordered or unordered data set is a common operation. This could be done by first counting records in each partition and then assign ranks in parallel.

The purpose of assigning ranks to an unordered set is usually to get a unique id for each item, e.g., to map feature names to feature indices. In such cases, the assignment could be done without counting records, saving one spark job.

https://spark-project.atlassian.net/browse/SPARK-1076