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.

The term compute can have multiple meanings, but the basic meaning is calculating a value using mathematical formulas or other methods. A computer processes many functions by computing information, which in its simplest form, is a series of ones and zeroes (called binary code). The computer got its name due to this.