Friday, December 13, 2013

Scientific computing: Overview


                           
       With the popularity of computer, scientific computing, known as computational science, is becoming to one of the fundamental mode in scientific research.  “Scientific computing is concerned with constructing mathematical models and quantitative analysis techniques and using computers to analyze and solve scientific  problems.”(Wiki)  
       
       The features of scientific computing are listed as follow.

1.      The first feature of scientific computing is to solve the wide range of data with a large amount of calculation. It is difficult to deal with the big data, a collection of data sets which are large and complex to process, by traditional data application.  Computer can easily solve the complicated problems. 

2.      The second feature is that the calculation is relatively simple. Using the scientific computing application, scientists can easily get the solution without hard work on hand calculation and formulas analyzing.

3.      The third feature is that the scientific computing involves not only data calculation but also a lot of graphical interaction.   

4.      The fourth feature is that scientific computing has high reliability and high performance. It is hard to correct the issues in the traditional way. When one data is wrong, people will re-calculate the formula and re-build the model from the beginning. It will take a long time to correct a small data mistake. Using the scientific computing application, the computer will help to finish all the calculation and model building. The only thing people will do is to find the mistake and correct it. 

       Scientific computing is used in various science fields. It not only saves the time and money but also changes the development of science.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_science

1 comment:

  1. Yibei,

    Your post is really informative. From it, I learned Scientific computing one more time. Everyone knows it is hard to write articles about boring science. But you are still giving readers a good post.

    I agree with you that Scientific computing is being used in many fields. Especially, it can be used to reconstruct earthquake and sub-atomic particle behaviour. Scientists can also use it to predict future or unobserved situations.

    In university, I took one course about scientific computing. we used computer to solve mathematics problems like differential equations. It is an interesting course but it is kind of boring. Ha-ha.





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