Is there any use to running Pandas on Spark? I just started working with PySpark this week, and the instance I have access two has Pandas installed. But what use is having Pandas on Spark? 

Isn't the whole purpose of running scripts on PySpark to overcome the limitations of packages like Pandas? 

Does Pandas performance improve if it run on Spark? Is it compatible with Spark's RDD ?
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)]