Chapter 2
The Computational Environment: Tools and Infrastructure
Computational work depends on a suitable combination of languages, development environments, scientific libraries, visualization tools, and hardware. This chapter explains how these components support exploration, numerical reliability, and larger simulations. It introduces tools for debugging, profiling, testing, documentation, and collaboration, and discusses how to balance development effort, execution time, memory, and available resources when choosing an environment for a physical problem.
In this chapter
- 2.1 The role of tools in computational physics
- 2.2 Programming languages
- 2.3 Development environments
- 2.4 Scientific libraries and packages
- 2.5 Visualization and data interpretation
- 2.6 Hardware and computational resources
- 2.7 Supporting tools for larger projects
- 2.8 Choosing tools