So I’ve recently been reading a bit of technical IT-related literature, and I keep stumbling across the word ‘compute’ used when I would use the gerund, ‘computing’. For instance, a book is titled Installation, Storage, and Compute with Windows Server 2016.
To me, this sounds grating, but I’m not a native speaker—so, is this correct usage? Or just some weird jargon? If the latter, any ideas on where it originated?
That indeed sounds strange to me. It’s two nouns and one verb in list. I would actually consider it a grammatical mistake.
Any other examples?
There is also ‘computation’.
But, judging from the context, it is probably a grammatical mistake and they meant something like [cloud] computing.
I consulted a few dictionaries, and ‘compute’ is listed as a verb in all of them.
It’s very commonly used in the enterprise hardware industry for CPU-based workloads. I hear it daily, probably.
Perhaps I spoke too soon: the Oxford English Dictionary lists ‘compute’ as a noun (as in “beyond compute”), now rare.
ETA: I see, thanks to Palooka, that it is being revived by the enterprise hardware industry. What is the definition? Shouldn’t the word in the title be ‘computes’, perhaps?
From this free ebook:
So as you can see, it’s incredibly prevalent—these were just the first five hits I got with a search, you can easily find many more throughout the ebook.
Something similar seems to be happening with ‘app’—I’ve read a couple of times now something like ‘to distribute app’ or ‘to host app’, as if there was this sort of undifferentiated sludge called ‘app’ that can be provided as a resource.
Any insights regarding the origin of this usage? It seems especially strange to me as the cases where it’s use don’t seem to require any new coinage—you could perfectly well talk about ‘computing services’ and the like.
[QUOTE=OED]
compute, n. Now rare.
(kəmˈpjuːt)[In sense 1, a. F. comput computus; in others f. the verb.]
compute, n. Now rare.
1413: Lydg. Pilgr. Sowle v. i. (1859) 73 “He that made this compute, and the kalendre.”
1533: More Answ. Poysoned Bk. iv. viii. “The common verse of the compute manuell.”
compute, n. Now rare.
2. Reckoning, calculation, computation. Now chiefly in phr. beyond compute.
1588: J. Harvey Disc. Probleme 19 “According to the historical Computes euen of sundry these fauorites.”
1656: H. More Antid. Ath. ii. ii. (1712) 45 “Any new pressure…cannot come into compute in this case.”
1705: Bp. Wilson in Keble Life iv. (1863) 146 “The expenses I have been at, which…by a modest compute comes to 100l. ready moneys.”
1776: Johnson Lett. (1788) I. 314 “With encrease of delight past compute, to use the phrase of Cumberland.”
1857: R. G. Latham Prichard’s East. Orig. Celtic N. 372 “My obligations to his learning…are beyond compute.”
compute, n. Now rare.
3. Estimation, judgement, reckoning. Obs.
1661: C. L. Origen’s Opin. in Phenix (1721) I. 48 “In the Compute and Judgement of that all-righteous Mind.”
1682: Glanvill Sadducismus (ed. 2) Ded., “If we make our compute like men, and do not suffer ourselves to be abused by the flatteries of sense.”
[/QUOTE]
so this is not new coinage. A compute = a calculation.
I hear it occasionally.“We need X flops of compute for this problem.” “Bottlenecks for implementation of this machine learning problem are: algorithms, data, and compute.”
Why that instead of “computing power?” Dunno. It’s faster, but not sure if that’s the reason.
Yeah, it’s just a snappier way to say computing power or refer to things connected to computing power.
Compute is used nowadays for when you treat computational power as a continuous rather than discrete variable. If you upgraded your home desktop PC from 2.2Ghz to 2.9Ghz, you’ve increased it’s computational power. But when your cluster auto scales from 300 nodes to 800 nodes, you’ve increased compute. It implies you’re working at a level where the raw CPUs get abstracted away and you’re instead dealing in abstract compute units.
People have been using ‘compute server’ as a noun for decades now, to refer to a computer on a LAN which provided fast CPU and plentiful RAM for other computers on the LAN to use to run jobs.
Using ‘compute’ as a noun means you’re treating it as a resource, like ‘disk’ or ‘RAM’ used as nouns, which is fungible and finely subdividable.
Endorsing this answer. It’s a term for when you’re talking about fungible computation units or machines. With the way cloud hosts work, you’re not really on a physical machine (technically, of course, you are), you’re just on a virtual machine that has been granted a finite amount of resources for its use out of the total whole that the underlying hardware supports. Among the resources are things like RAM, HD, and ‘compute’.
Chiming in to endorse the previous answers. I became aware of this use of the word a few years ago, but it was probably in use before that.
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I’ve been in IT since 1977 and this is the first time I’ve had this usage brought to my attention. It sounds like doubleplusgood newspeak crap to me.
Could be called Cloud Computational Power or CCP. Is that too close to CCCP?
Hey, if “interrupt” can be made into a noun, why not “compute”?
There is a related usage with graphics chips (GPUs): when the chip is in a mode specialized for generic computation (as opposed to specifically graphics), it is doing “compute”. Subunits that manage this work are called “compute hardware” or the like.
Also–and this is a bit confusing to due to history–the programs that execute are called “compute shaders”. “Shaders”, because traditionally, these programs were used to calculate the lighting on the pixels and vertices in the scene. There are “pixel shaders”, “vertex shaders”, and some others.
If you need to quantify processing power, there are standard measures like MIPS and FLOPS.
See above- apparently it is a real noun.
MIPS and FLOPS are units to measure a thing, not the thing itself.
And while others have found instances of “compute” used as a noun, that meaning of the word still doesn’t make sense in the context the OP quoted. Compute is a resource. A title like “Memory, drive space, and compute with Windows Server 2016” might make sense, because that’s listing three resources. But “Installation, storage, and compute” is two processes and one resource.
I, too, am new to this usage. Is it pronounced differently than the verb? My inclination would be that, if used as a noun, to pronounce it with the stress on the first syllable, like COM-pute instead of cum-PUTE.
Not according to the Oxford English Dictionary, unless I am misreading the IPA there. The Oxford Dictionary of English does not list it as a noun.