Computational Science is a unifying framework for computer applications in different fields of science and engineering beyond what we generally call information technology. It is concerned with the use of computers to

• analyze
• model
• simulate, and
• control systems.

Information Technology (IT), in contrast, deals with uses of computers to

• store,
• process, and
• retrieve

Computers create new information by performing vast number of simple operations. While this is most familiar to us in their ability to solve mathematical equations that describe physical systems, computational science has considerably broadened in recent years and now encompasses fields as diverse as bioinformatics, computational finance, and computational linguistics.

As a scientific discipline that deals with modeling the real world, it not only has applications in pure science, but it has gained more and more importance in applied sciences and engineering. As computers are used more and more in corporate research and development to improve efficiency and develop new products, computational capabilities have become business-critical elements of many companies.