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Niall Gaffney has managed some of the richest astronomical data ever recorded in terms of scientific and public impact. In his new role at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Gaffney will oversee the center's big data strategy, and will help TACC address challenges with core techniques and technologies.

With access to significantly more computational power, researchers can provide more accurate earthquake predictions with the potential to save lives and minimize property damage. Read about advances in developing code to cut both research times and energy costs in simulating seismic hazards.

In 2012, the United States suffered its worst drought in 24 years, which led to the worst harvest yields in nearly two decades. Read how scientists are using this data to validate crop yield and climate impact models that simulate the effects of climate on agriculture.

The University of Texas at Austin and TACC competed against the top supercomputing centers and universities to claim one of the most advanced systems in the world — and won. The prize, an estimated $50 million-plus investment over a four-year period.

We are living in the golden age of exoplanets — over 800 are known, and new discoveries are announced weekly. Find out about the vital role high-performance computing is playing in enabling these discoveries.

With more than 10,000 species of birds known to exist, scientists know little about their diversity and development over time. Freely licensed software developed at the University of Utah, US, has enabled researchers to pinpoint a single gene responsible for some very glamorous hairdos.

Calling all citizen scientists. With the exploding availability of data, the need for analysis is steadily becoming a bottleneck in many scientific pursuits. Read about a project aimed at bringing neuroscience to the masses in a way that may surprise and inspire you to take part.

Harnessing NASA’s supercomputer, Pleiades, to reconstruct the dynamic forces and undercurrents of the Earth's ocean and sea-ice system.

Using software to predict how proteins fold at the molecular level, scientists have discovered new information about misfolding and the submolecular level energies involved. Read about the open source software used for simulations, and the potential implications for treatment of degenerative diseases.

Scientists now have enough data to analyze brain activity using graph theory. Read about their unique approach and their discovery of how the brain could code and recall spatial and temporal memories at the same time.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations can easily generate 100+ terabytes of data. Scientists and engineers depend on supercomputers with hundreds of thousands of computing cores to solve the complex equations involved. Read about successful simulations breaking the million-core barrier.

A researcher from the University of Missouri has broken a 4-year-old record for the largest ever prime number discovered. The discovery was made thanks to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a distributed computing project established in 1996.