This unparalled growth has redefined the classes of physics problems we are able to solve. What seemed at the forefront of research ten years ago can now be done on a high-speed scientific workstation. Today's massively parallel supercomputers allow us to address, at a fundamental rather than phenomenological level, some of the most challenging theoretical problems of modern-day physics. There are essentially two different approaches to the quantum many-particle problem which might be termed phenomenological and fundamental. This approach is often the first stage in the development of a theory.
Computational physicists prefer the second approach.
Because of the complexity of quantum mechanical many-body problems this implies a numerical implementation on massively parallel architectures and requires substantial advances in both science and compuational algorithms. Nevertheless, with careful planning, computational physicists are capable of developing numerical methods and algorithms that can be utilized in a transparent manner in many subfields of physics. Computational physics is truly interdisciplinary.