NullPointerException in Scala Spark, appears to be caused be collection type?

Spark doesn't support nesting of RDDs (see https://stackoverflow.com/a/14130534/590203 for another occurrence of the same problem), so you can't perform transformations or actions on RDDs inside of other RDD operations.

In the first case, you're seeing a NullPointerException thrown by the worker when it tries to access a SparkContext object that's only present on the driver and not the workers.

In the second case, my hunch is the job was run locally on the driver and worked purely by accident.

Its a reasonable question and I have heard it asked it enough times that. I'm going to try to take a stab at explaining why this is true, because it might help.

Nested RDDs will always throw an exception in production. Nested function calls as I think you are describing them here, if it means calling an RDD operation inside an RDD operation, will cause also cause failures since it is actually the same thing. (RDDs are immutable, so performing an RDD operation such as a "map" is equivalent to creating a new RDD.) The in ability to create nested RDDs is a necessary consequence of the way an RDD is defined and the way the Spark Application is set up.

An RDD is a distributed collection of objects (called partitions) that live on the Spark Executors. Spark executors cannot communicate with each other, only with the Spark driver. The RDD operations are all computed in pieces on these partitions.Because the RDD's executor environment isn't recursive (i.e. you can configure a Spark driver to be on a spark executor with sub executors) neither can an RDD.

In your program, you have created a distributed collection of partitions of integers. You are then performing a mapping operation. When the Spark driver sees a mapping operation, it sends the instructions to do the mapping to the executors, who perform the transformation on each partition in parallel. But your mapping cannot be done, because on each partition you are trying to call the "whole RDD" to perform another distributed operation. This can't not be done, because each partition does not have access to the information on the other partitions, if it did, the computation couldn't run in parallel.

What you can do instead, because the data you need in the map is probably small (since you are doing a filter, and the filter does not require any information about sessionIdList) is to first filter the session ID list. Then collect that list to the driver. Then broadcast it to the executors, where you can use it in the map. If the sessionID list is too large, you will probably need to do a join.