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

Reading and writing HDF5 files


Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) is a common file format for storing, organizing, and retrieving large amounts of data. It was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and remains a popular file format for storing large amounts of scientific data in a semi-structured format. The website of the group responsible for maintaining the HDF5 standard and the previous HDF4 standard, as well as the library for accessing these files and wrappers for many programming languages, is as follows: https://www.hdfgroup.org/.

Right now, there isn't a convenient way of accessing HDF5 files in a way that would use Scala's programming style and idioms. The reader is encouraged to use the Java libraries for HDF5 access instead. These libraries should be placed in the lib folder of your project and then can be used in much the same way they would be used in any Java program. To learn how to use the Java wrapper for the HDF5 libraries, consult the examples provided...