Is there any use to running Pandas on Spark?
There is no need for pandas module to be installed because your data is generally stored in spark RDD or spark dataframes objects.

The only interest I have found using Spark with pandas is when you want to load a local CSV / Excel dataset and then transform it into a spark dataframe. The "createDataFrame" method handles this approach.

&gt;&gt;&gt; sqlContext.createDataFrame(pandas.DataFrame([[1, 2]])).collect()  
[Row(0=1, 1=2)]