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

Installing and running ScalaLab


Currently, and hopefully when you are reading this as well, the website where you can find ScalaLab is the following:

https://code.google.com/p/scalalab/

You can get the files needed to run ScalaLab from SourceForge. The link is provided here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/scalalab/

However, note that there are a lot of files available currently on the download page of ScalaLab. It may be confusing to pick the right one. I suggest downloading the newest file that begins with ScalaLabAll. For example, ScalaLabAllNov15.zip. The file should be around 160 MB. Download the file on to your hard drive and extract the archive. Open a terminal window and navigate to the directory you extracted the files into. You can then run ScalaLab by executing one of the scripts provided. Exactly which one to execute will depend on what operating system you are using and whether you are on a 32- or 64-bit system. For example, on my Linux laptop, the command is given as follows...