www.top500.org/blog/...ience_discovery_next_computing_landscape
From Computational Science to Science Discovery: The Next Computing Landscape
Thu, 2010-01-21 01:22
Gilad Shainer, Brian Sparks, Scot Schultz, Eric Lantz, William Liu, Tong Liu,Goldi Misra
HPC Advisory Council
Computational science is the field of study concerned with constructing mathematical models and numerical techniques that represent scientific, social scientific or engineering problems and employing these models on computers, or clusters of computers to analyze, explore or solve these models. Numerical simulation enables the study of complex phenomena that would be too expensive or dangerous to study by direct experimentation. The quest for ever higher levels of detail and realism in such simulations requires enormous computational capacity, and has provided the impetus for breakthroughs in computer algorithms and architectures. Due to these advances, computational scientists and engineers can now solve large scale problems that were once thought intractable by creating the related models and simulate them via high performance compute clusters or supercomputers. Simulation is being used as an integral part of the manufacturing, design and decision making processes, and as a fundamental tool for scientific research. Problems where high performance simulation play a pivotal role include for example weather and climate prediction, nuclear and energy research, simulation and design of vehicles and aircrafts, electronic design automation, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, biology, computational chemistry and more.
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