Introduction to Scientific and Technical Computing

Created to help scientists and engineers write computer code, this practical book addresses the important tools and techniques that are necessary for scientific computing, but which are not yet commonplace in science and engineering curricula. This book contains chapters summarizing the most important topics that computational researchers need to know about. It leverages the viewpoints of passionate experts involved with scientific computing courses around the globe and aims to be a starting point for new computational scientists and a reference for the experienced. Each contributed chapter focuses on a specific tool or skill, providing the content needed to provide a working knowledge of the topic in about one day. While many individual books on specific computing topics exist, none is explicitly focused on getting technical professionals and students up and running immediately across a variety of computational areas.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Operating Systems Overview
Chapter 2. Machine Numbers and the IEEE 754 Floating-Point Standard
Chapter 3. Developing with Git and Github
Chapter 4. Introduction to Bash Scripting
Chapter 5. Debugging with gdb
Chapter 6. Makefiles, Libraries, and Linking
Chapter 7. Linking and Interoperability
Chapter 8. Build Management with CMake
Chapter 9. Getting Started with Python 3
Chapter 10. Prototyping
Chapter 11. Introduction to High-Performance Computing Systems
Chapter 12. Introduction to Parallel Programming with MPI
Chapter 13. Introduction to OpenMP
Chapter 14. Checkpointing Code for Restartability with HDF5
Chapter 15. Libraries for Linear Algebra
Chapter 16. Parallel Computing with Accelerators
Chapter 17. Testing and Verification
Chapter 18. Validation of Computational Models and Codes
Chapter 19. Software Licensing and Distribution