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

Other ScalaLab features


To cover everything that is made available via ScalaLab would take a separate book. Let's dedicate this section to examining some of the more interesting things provided by ScalaLab.

Doing symbolic algebra using symja

symja is a symbolic algebra system for Java. It implements the basic functionality one might expect from a symbolic algebra package. For example, you can enter and evaluate expressions, simplify them, calculate derivatives symbolically, and many other things. You can access the symja window from ScalaLab's ComputerAlgebra | Main symja interface menu option. It will open the window shown in the screenshot:

You can enter expressions in the text area that occupies the upper half of the window. The result will be shown in the bottom half area. You can enable LaTeX output by selecting TeXForm in the drop-down menu and checking the Pretty Formula? checkbox.

We will not go through the functionality provided by symja fully, but let's look at some simple examples...