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 (11 chapters)
10
Index

Basic Saddle data structures

In this section, we will examine the basic data structures available to you when using Saddle. A lot of these you will recognize from similar data types in other systems. We will generally only quickly overview them. More advanced uses are covered in other sections. All of the examples in this section can be done from the REPL. We will only need to start creating separate .scala files when we come to the more elaborate examples in the other sections. To start working with any of the following code examples, you need to first import the Saddle package:

scala> import org.saddle._
import org.saddle._

Using the Vec structure

The simplest type covered here is the vector. It is closest to a simple array in terms of functionality. On top of the functions expected from a one-dimensional array kind-of-type, there are also various mathematical functions defined for them. Let's see what those are. First of all, you will want to create a vector. The simplest way to...