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

Agent-based concurrency with the Akka framework


Akka is an agent-based concurrency framework for Scala. It is developed by Typesafe Inc.—the company founded by the creator of the Scala language, Martin Odersky. Therefore, you can be pretty sure that the framework is here to stay. The framework is developed with the goal of simplifying the creation of concurrent programs for the JVM framework.

It is based on the concept of actors communicating by exchanging messages. Each actor will usually run on a separate thread and will abstract some activity that is to be done in parallel. The threading is managed behind the scenes and the writer of the program does not have to worry about low-level details.

It manages to avoid a lot of the issues that plague distributed programming using non-blocking, asynchronous messaging systems. It also supports running programs on clusters. So, your parallel program can work on a super-computing cluster as well as locally on your multicore machine. You can visit...