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

Plotting with ScalaLab


Plotting is discussed in a separate chapter in this book. However, plotting is a very important part of any interactive computing system. Also ScalaLab is not a Scala library per se. It does own thing but uses Scala as a scripting language. As such, we will discuss ScalaLab's plotting here briefly. Hopefully, this will make explorative computing with ScalaLab much more interesting. Plus, ScalaLab supports a fairly extensive plotting API modeled after MATLAB. An example is shown in the following screenshot:

Let's see how to create a simple plot. We use the plot method to plot a sinusoid as well as well as the title method to set the title of the plot:

import scalaSci._

var x = linspace(0.0, 4.0 * PI, 100)
var y = sin(x)
plot(x, y)

You will get the plot given in the figure. Let's now explore slightly more advanced plots. For example, the plotting API allows subplots. That is, we can have several different plots in the same figure. For example, we might want to plot a signal...