I am new to cluster-computing and I am trying to set up a minimal 2-node cluster in Spark. What I am still a bit confused about: Do I have to set up a full Hadoop installat
Apache Spark is independent from Hadoop. Spark allows you to use different sources of data (incl. HDFS) and is capable of running either in a standalone cluster, or using an existing resource management framework (eg. YARN, Mesos).
So if you're only interested in Spark, there is no need to install Hadoop.