The Science Of Computing

The identity of computing has been fiercely debated throughout its short history. Why is it still so hard to define computing as an academic discipline? Is computing a scientific, mathematical, or engineering discipline? By describing the mathematical, engineering, and scientific traditions of computing, The Science of Computing: Shaping a Discipline presents a rich picture of computing from the viewpoints of the field’s champions. The book helps readers understand the debates about computing as a discipline. It explains the context of computing’s central debates and portrays a broad perspective of the discipline. The book first looks at computing as a formal, theoretical discipline that is in many ways similar to mathematics, yet different in crucial ways. It traces a number of discussions about the theoretical nature of computing from the field’s intellectual origins in mathematical logic to modern views of the role of theory in computing. The book then explores the debates about computing as an engineering discipline, from the central technical innovations to the birth of the modern technical paradigm of computing to computing’s arrival as a new technical profession to software engineering gradually becoming an academic discipline. It presents arguments for and against the view of computing as engineering within the context of software production and analyzes the clash between the theoretical and practical mindsets. The book concludes with the view of computing as a science in its own right—not just as a tool for other sciences. It covers the early identity debates of computing, various views of computing as a science, and some famous characterizations of the discipline. It also addresses the experimental computer science debate, the view of computing as a natural science, and the algorithmization of sciences.

Publishers description: Michael Knee offers a selective guide to the major resources and tools central to the computer industry. A discussion of three commonly used subject classification systems precedes an annotated bibliography of over 500 items.

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics -- Galileo Galilei How is it possible to predict weather patterns for tomorrow, with access solely to today’s weather data? And how is it possible to predict the aerodynamic behavior of an aircraft that has yet to be built? The answer is computer simulations based on mathematical models – sets of equations – that describe the underlying physical properties. However, these equations are usually much too complicated to solve, either by the smartest mathematician or the largest supercomputer. This problem is overcome by constructing an approximation: a numerical model with a simpler structure can be translated into a program that tells the computer how to carry out the simulation. This book conveys the fundamentals of mathematical models, numerical methods and algorithms. Opening with a tutorial on mathematical models and analysis, it proceeds to introduce the most important classes of numerical methods, with finite element, finite difference and spectral methods as central tools. The concluding section describes applications in physics and engineering, including wave propagation, heat conduction and fluid dynamics. Also covered are the principles of computers and programming, including MATLAB®.

The book provides an introduction to common programming tools and methods in numerical mathematics and scientific computing. Unlike widely used standard approaches, it does not focus on any particular language but aims to explain the key underlying concepts. In general, new concepts are first introduced in the particularly user-friendly Python language and then transferred and expanded in various scientific programming environments from C / C ++, Julia and MATLAB to Maple. This includes different approaches to distributed computing. The fact that different languages are studied and compared also makes the book useful for mathematicians and practitioners trying to decide which programming language to use for which purposes.

This book offers a new approach to introductory scientific computing. It aims to make students comfortable using computers to do science, to provide them with the computational tools and knowledge they need throughout their college careers and into their professional careers, and to show how all the pieces can work together. Rubin Landau introduces the requisite mathematics and computer science in the course of realistic problems, from energy use to the building of skyscrapers to projectile motion with drag. He is attentive to how each discipline uses its own language to describe the same concepts and how computations are concrete instances of the abstract. Landau covers the basics of computation, numerical analysis, and programming from a computational science perspective. The first part of the printed book uses the problem-solving environment Maple as its context, with the same material covered on the accompanying CD as both Maple and Mathematica programs; the second part uses the compiled language Java, with equivalent materials in Fortran90 on the CD; and the final part presents an introduction to LaTeX replete with sample files. Providing the essentials of computing, with practical examples, A First Course in Scientific Computing adheres to the principle that science and engineering students learn computation best while sitting in front of a computer, book in hand, in trial-and-error mode. Not only is it an invaluable learning text and an essential reference for students of mathematics, engineering, physics, and other sciences, but it is also a consummate model for future textbooks in computational science and engineering courses. A broad spectrum of computing tools and examples that can be used throughout an academic career Practical computing aimed at solving realistic problems Both symbolic and numerical computations A multidisciplinary approach: science + math + computer science Maple and Java in the book itself; Mathematica, Fortran90, Maple and Java on the accompanying CD in an interactive workbook format

Science used to be experiments and theory, now it is experiments, theory and computations. The computational approach to understanding nature and technology is currently flowering in many fields such as physics, geophysics, astrophysics, chemistry, biology, and most engineering disciplines. This book is a gentle introduction to such computational methods where the techniques are explained through examples. It is our goal to teach principles and ideas that carry over from field to field. You will learn basic methods and how to implement them. In order to gain the most from this text, you will need prior knowledge of calculus, basic linear algebra and elementary programming.

A proposal that computing is not merely a form of engineering but a scientific domain on a par with the physical, life, and social sciences. Computing is not simply about hardware or software, or calculation or applications. Computing, writes Paul Rosenbloom, is an exciting and diverse, yet remarkably coherent, scientific enterprise that is highly multidisciplinary yet maintains a unique core of its own. In On Computing, Rosenbloom proposes that computing is a great scientific domain on a par with the physical, life, and social sciences. Rosenbloom introduces a relational approach for understanding computing, conceptualizing it in terms of forms of interaction and implementation, to reveal the hidden structures and connections among its disciplines. He argues for the continuing vitality of computing, surveying the leading edge in computing's combination with other domains, from biocomputing and brain-computer interfaces to crowdsourcing and virtual humans to robots and the intermingling of the real and the virtual. He explores forms of higher order coherence, or macrostructures, over complex computing topics and organizations. Finally, he examines the very notion of a great scientific domain in philosophical terms, honing his argument that computing should be considered the fourth great scientific domain. With On Computing, Rosenbloom, a key architect of the founding of University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies and former Deputy Director of USC's Information Sciences Institute, offers a broader perspective on what computing is and what it can become.

State-of-the-Art Approaches to Advance the Large-Scale Green Computing Movement Edited by one of the founders and lead investigator of the Green500 list, The Green Computing Book: Tackling Energy Efficiency at Large Scale explores seminal research in large-scale green computing. It begins with low-level, hardware-based approaches and then traverses up the software stack with increasingly higher-level, software-based approaches. In the first chapter, the IBM Blue Gene team illustrates how to improve the energy efficiency of a supercomputer by an order of magnitude without any system performance loss in parallelizable applications. The next few chapters explain how to enhance the energy efficiency of a large-scale computing system via compiler-directed energy optimizations, an adaptive run-time system, and a general prediction performance framework. The book then explores the interactions between energy management and reliability and describes storage system organization that maximizes energy efficiency and reliability. It also addresses the need for coordinated power control across different layers and covers demand response policies in computing centers. The final chapter assesses the impact of servers on data center costs.