Book Image

Scientific Computing with Scala

By : Vytautas Jancauskas
Book Image

Scientific Computing with Scala

By: Vytautas Jancauskas

Overview of this book

Scala is a statically typed, Java Virtual Machine (JVM)-based language with strong support for functional programming. There exist libraries for Scala that cover a range of common scientific computing tasks – from linear algebra and numerical algorithms to convenient and safe parallelization to powerful plotting facilities. Learning to use these to perform common scientific tasks will allow you to write programs that are both fast and easy to write and maintain. We will start by discussing the advantages of using Scala over other scientific computing platforms. You will discover Scala packages that provide the functionality you have come to expect when writing scientific software. We will explore using Scala's Breeze library for linear algebra, optimization, and signal processing. We will then proceed to the Saddle library for data analysis. If you have experience in R or with Python's popular pandas library you will learn how to translate those skills to Saddle. If you are new to data analysis, you will learn basic concepts of Saddle as well. Well will explore the numerical computing environment called ScalaLab. It comes bundled with a lot of scientific software readily available. We will use it for interactive computing, data analysis, and visualization. In the following chapters, we will explore using Scala's powerful parallel collections for safe and convenient parallel programming. Topics such as the Akka concurrency framework will be covered. Finally, you will learn about multivariate data visualization and how to produce professional-looking plots in Scala easily. After reading the book, you should have more than enough information on how to start using Scala as your scientific computing platform
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Scientific Computing with Scala
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Storing and Retrieving Data

In this chapter, we will discuss data storage and retrieval in Scala. These two things are important to know about, because in most contexts you will need to perform anything that could be considered scientific computing. You will very likely need to read in data in some format and to output the results in some format. For example, a lot of test data for pattern recognition algorithms is stored in CSV format. Another popular way of storing data is in SQL databases. For use in any kind of numerical or symbolic calculations, this data will have to be retrieved. To retrieve it, you must have a way of writing SQL queries to be performed on the said database. Another popular way to store data, especially if the data is large in volume, is HDF5 format files. They are commonly used to store the results of experiments producing large amounts of data that need to be stored in a structured way. Whenever possible, we will try to present the best possible way of...