Compute

The term compute, in modern computing, refers to activities, applications, or workloads that require more processing resources than its memory or I/O resource requirements. Generally speaking, compute is used to describe concepts and objects geared towards computation and processing. For example, CPUs, APUs, and GPUs are considered compute resources while graphics processing applications like 3-D rendering and video games are described as compute-intensive applications. 

Compute is frequently encountered in modern computing concepts like cloud computing and big data from on-premise platforms, used to refer to resources being used or served up in the server and data center spaces. In utility computing as in cloud computing and big data from on-premise platforms, resources that are used to process data are called compute resources that are provided by CPUs working together in clusters. The partners of compute resources are memory resources, storage resources, network resources, and I/O resources.