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

Summary


In this chapter, we provided an overview of ScalaLab—an interactive computing environment written in Java that uses Scala as a scripting language. The Scala interpreter automatically loads various extensions to Scala when ScalaLab is started. For example, classes representing vectors and matrices of doubles are automatically loaded; so are various methods that operate on these data structures.

We provided a quick overview of this functionality. We also explored the plotting facilities provided by ScalaLab. These are modeled after those found in MATLAB, like many things in ScalaLab.

You learned to do simple two-dimensional plots, multiple subplots on the same figure, as well as three-dimensional plots. We then moved to the symbolic algebra capabilities that ScalaLab provides with the help of the symja symbolic algebra package for Java. After reading this chapter, the reader should be able to install and run ScalaLab and perform basic interactive computing tasks with it.