Computational Science concerns the application of computer science to physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology and the other sciences. As well as being concerned with the computing technologies for managing and processing data and experiments in science, a key area of importance is in computer simulation of various models in the sciences, often for the purposes of exploring or validating some theoretical ideas.
Computational Science is sometimes referred to as "the third science" as it often ties together the two more traditional areas of experiment and theory. This is still a useful definition, although so many of the ideas in computational science have diffused their way into traditional science, that perhaps it is no longer so important to think of the three areas as separate. Nevertheless scientists are often by temperament and approach in one of these three main groupings.
Some popular recent terms are e-Science and i-Science which generally include the realm of computational science but also add the uses of computing technology in support of collaboration, management and the creation of virtual organisations.
Managing experimental data whether it be conventional observational data or that generated from computer simulations, involves the application of storage, statistical and other analysis and data integration techniques and frequently data mining and data warehousing methods. High performance and state of the art computing technologies for processing power, storage capacity and network capacity access rates have traditionally played a prominent part in computational science. The widespread invasion of desktop resources into all aspects and levels of science and engineering however reflects the fundamental importance of modern computing technologies.
Some particular advantages and issues connected with use of computing in science in general are:
Some key supporting areas of computing technology are:
There are copious web resources linking to activities, laboratories, reseach groups or case studies in computational science. Some of these are collated at the link above.
Computational Science or "eScience" is emerging as a new discipline. It is still unclear whether it is best taught as a separate "first discipline" in its own right or as a post graduate discipline. Many programmes support Computational Science through a major/minor combination of existing sciene and computing carricula. Some Universities are starting to offer Computational Science programmes. It is clear that the problem solving and highly applicable nature of the body of knowledge of Computational Science is already important to industry. What is becoming clearer in recent years is the important role the "third science" is playing as more and more of the important areas and contributions of science overall lie in the multidisciplinary overlap areas between traditional scienctific disciplines.
More information on the work of our research group on Computational Science is provided in the Computational Science Technical Note (CSTN) series.
A recent talk on Computational Science provides an overview look at what it actually involves.