Old question but an answer was never accepted, the mistake at the time I read it is mixing the "local" concept of Spark with "localhost."
Using this constructor: JavaSparkContext(java.lang.String master, java.lang.String appName)
, you would want to use:
JavaSparkContext sc = new JavaSparkContext("localhost", "Simple App");
but the question was using "local". Further, the HDFS filename didn't specify a hostname: "hdfs://SomeNameNode:9000/foo/bar/"
or
"hdfs://host:port/absolute-path"
As of 1.6.2, the Javadoc for JavaSparkContext is not showing any constructor that let's you specify the cluster type directly:
http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/api/java/index.html?org/apache/spark/api/java/JavaSparkContext.html
The best constructor for JavaSparkContext wants a SparkConf object. To do something more readable by humans, build a SparkConf object and then pass it to JavaSparkContext, here's an example that sets the appname, specifies Kryo serializer and sets the master:
SparkConf sparkConf = new SparkConf().setAppName("Threshold")
//.setMaster("local[4]");
.setMaster(getMasterString(masterName))
.set("spark.serializer", "org.apache.spark.serializer.KryoSerializer")
.registerKryoClasses(kryoClassArray);
// create the JavaSparkContext now:
JavaSparkContext jsc = new JavaSparkContext(sparkConf);
NOTE: the alternate .setMaster("local[4]");
would use local mode, which the OP may have been trying.
I have a more extended answer here that addresses using hostnames vs. IP addresses and a lot more for setting up your SparkConf