Spark and Parquet Backend for cBioPortal Web API

cBioPortal utilizes a Spring MVC architecture with MyBatis for the persistence layer and a relational database (MySQL) for data storage. As the number and size of cancer datasets increase, high-performance computing and storage will only become more vital in providing an adequate cBioPortal user experience. The primary goals of this project are to use Spark and Parquet to improve the performance of the existing web APIs and to provide a high-performance computing platform for future development.