This chapter is all about data for scientific computations. It introduces the concepts of this data, and then covers the various toolkits used to manage this data and the operations to be performed on it. After that, various data formats and random-number-based techniques for generating synthetic numerical data are discussed.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
The basics of data, information, and knowledge
The concepts of various pieces of data storage software and tools
Operations that can be performed on the data
Details of the standard formats for scientific data
A discussion on ready-to-use datasets
Synthetic data generation using random numbers
The idea of large-scale datasets