Magazine: Spring 2013 | Volume 19, No. 3
Solving large-scale, complex problems, such as climate change or nuclear stockpile stewardship, would be next to impossible without scientific computing. And thanks to advances in high-performance computing, scientific computing continues to flourish. Scientific computing, also known as computational science, emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration in the development of computer programs, software applications, and computer simulations. The intersection of computer science, engineering, and applied mathematics is at the heart of scientific computing; computer-based models are used to analyze diverse scientific problems across biology, geology, chemistry, ecology, climatology, and physics, to name a few. For those of you who are computational scientists, or leaning in that direction, this issue provides a comprehensive overview of a diverse and growing field.
Download
- Digital Edition web-based magazine available for subscribers – sign in
- PDF via ACM’s Digital Library
DEPARTMENT: Blogs
Drones and the digital panopticon
The XRDS blog highlights a range of topics from conference overviews to privacy and security, from HCI to cryptography. Selected blog posts, edited for print, will be featured in every issue. Please visit xrds.acm.org/blog to read each post in its entirety.
By Lea Rosen
Data security in the cloud environment
By Dimitris Mitropoulos
SECTION: Features
Scientific computing in the age of complexity
Climate modeling has come a long way since von Neumann declared it a problem too hard for pencil and paper, but tailor-made for the new digital computers. As the models and computers both evolve toward ever-greater complexity, they are changing our notions of digital simulation itself.
By V. Balaji
Electrical modeling and simulation for stockpile stewardship
A survey of radiation modeling and circuit simulation approaches that are essential for stockpile stewardship.
By Heidi K. Thornquist, Eric R. Keiter, Sivasankaran Rajamanickam
A look inside the earth
On the computational resources and techniques required for imaging the Earth's crust.
By Gregory A. Newman
Challenges and methods in large-scale computational chemistry applications
Interesting problems in computational chemistry from a computer science perspective.
By Jeff R. Hammond
Expanders, tropical semi-rings, and nuclear norms
Scientific computing for social and modern information networks.
By David Gleich
Massive streaming data analytics
Analyzing massive streaming graphs efficiently requires new algorithms, data structures, and computing platforms.
By Jason Riedy, David A. Bader
Linguistic structure prediction with the sparseptron
Recent advances in natural language processing bring together rich representations and scalable machine learning algorithms.
By Noah A. Smith, André F. T. Martins
How much (execution) time and energy does my algorithm cost?
Do we need to design algorithms differently if our goal is to save energy, rather than time or space? This article presents a simple and speculative thought experiment that suggests when and why the answer could be "yes."
By Jee Whan Choi, Richard W. Vuduc
High-performance computing and the cloud
Infrastructure clouds offer tremendous potential for scientific users, however, they face numerous challenges that must be addressed before they are widely adopted by scientific communities.
By Paul Marshall, Henry Tufo, Kate Keahey
Dream applications of verifiable computational results
A new system allows researchers to discover, reuse, cite, and experiment upon any computational result that is published with a Verifiable Result Identifier.
By Matan Gavish, David Donoho, Amos Onn
Profile Arthur S. Bland
High performance at Oak Ridge laboratory
By Adrian Scoică, Arthur S. Bland