Compute refers to applications and workloads that require a great deal of computation, necessitating sufficient resources to handle these computation demands in an efficient manner.
Compute-intensive applications stand in contrast to data-intensive applications, which typically handle large volumes of data and as a result place a greater demand on input/output and data manipulation tasks.
The term compute is frequently encountered in the server and data center space as well as in cloud computing, where infrastructure and resources can be ideally constructed to efficiently handle compute-intensive applications that require large amounts of compute power for extended periods of time.
Compute is also sometimes referred to as Big Compute as a play off of the popular Big Data term.
