squestion on using spark parallelism vs using num partitions in spark api

[Hussam_Jarada]

Hi,

Using spark 0.8.1 ... jave code running on 8 CPU with 16GRAM single node

It's looks like upon setting spark parallelism using 
System.setProperty("spark.default.parallelism", 24) before creating my spark 
context as described in 
http://spark.incubator.apache.org/docs/latest/tuning.html#level-of-parallelism 
has no effect on the default number of partitions that spark uses in its api's 
like saveAsTextFile() .

For example if I set spark.default.parallelism to 24, I was expecting 24 tasks 
to be invoked upon calling saveAsTextFile() but it's not the case as I am 
seeing only 1 task get invoked

If I set my RDD parallelize() to 2 as
dataSetRDD = SparkDriver.getSparkContext().parallelize(mydata,2);
then invoke
dataSetRDD.saveAsTextFile(JavaRddFilePath);

I am seeing 2 tasks get invoked even my spark.default.parallelism was set to 24

Can someone explain the above behavior?

Thanks,
Hussam