Scientific Computing

Computational science (also scientific computing or scientific computation (SC)) is a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems. Computational science fuses three distinct elements:

In practical use, it is typically the application of computer simulation and other forms of computation from numerical analysis and theoretical computer science to solve problems in various scientific disciplines.

The field is different from theory and laboratory experiment which are the traditional forms of science and engineering. The scientific computing approach is to gain understanding, mainly through the analysis of mathematical models implemented on computers.

Scientists and engineers develop computer programs, application software, that model systems being studied and run these programs with various sets of input parameters. In some cases, these models require massive amounts of calculations (usually floating-point) and are often executed on supercomputers or distributed computing platforms.

Numerical analysis is an important underpinning for techniques used in computational science.

Problem domains for computational science/scientific computing include:

Numerical simulations have different objectives depending on the nature of the task being simulated:

Algorithms and mathematical methods used in computational science are varied. Commonly applied methods include:

Both historically and today, Fortran remains popular for most applications of scientific computing. Other programming languages and computer algebra systems commonly used for the more mathematical aspects of scientific computing applications include GNU Octave, Haskell,Julia,Maple,Mathematica,MATLAB, Python (with third-party SciPy library), Perl (with third-party PDL library),R, SciLab, and TK Solver. The more computationally intensive aspects of scientific computing will often use some variation of C or Fortran and optimized algebra libraries such as BLAS or LAPACK.

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