That sounds like a problem between Py4J and Hadoop, or maybe pyspark. There's not a single appearance of anything from Jupyter in either the code or the error message you posted. I doubt that you will find much help for that problem in a Jupyter forum. Have you reached out to the Hadoop and/or Spark communities yet?
One possible explanation is that the kernel might be missing Spark configuration. Or that "findspark" initializes a local Spark instance, whereas you would want it to connect to the cluster you have set up. Or that the former leads to the latter. But you'll need advice from people with Spark skills, rather than Jupyter skills, to figure that out.
cheers,
Roland