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

Using Scala's parallel collections


Scala's parallel collections are a way to provide users with simple and safe tools to perform parallel programming. They come at the expense of reduced generality; however, for a vast number of parallel applications, they will be a simple and sufficient solution. Parallel collections work by providing parallel versions of various Scala collection classes. How that works can be easily seen with an example. First, we import the ParSeq class:

scala> import scala.collection.parallel.ParSeq
import scala.collection.parallel.ParSeq

We then create a list and get it's parallel counterpart. For all collections, this works the same way—by invoking the par method on the instance of that collection. The par method simply returns a parallel version of that collection. For example, if invoked on a List object, it will return the parallel version of List. The parallel version acts the same as a regular collection of that type, the only difference being that certain...