When it comes to hurricanes, it’s only a matter of time before the next big storm will strike Florida. That’s one reason why, in 2007, Florida’s Legislature created The Florida Catastrophic Storm Risk Management Center at Florida State University. Housed in the College of Business, the Center coordinates critical research in catastrophe risk management to help facilitate decision making by state policy makers.

Adrian Barbu at the Florida State University Department of Statistics regularly works with data in the billions of rows. Dr. Barbu creates algorithms and statistical methodologies for a variety of applications. Repeatedly running his algorithms over the immense matrix of numbers takes a large amount of time.

Kunihiko “Sam” Taira is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the AME Center. He and his team of students in the Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (CFD) are studying fluid flow around various objects. “You may have heard about aerodynamics around airplanes and cars,” states Sam. “Studying the flow of air over bodies such as these is what we essentially do. We also try to modify the behavior of the flow in a beneficial way with what’s called active flow control.” Some aspects of fluid flows that interest researchers at the CFD Lab include vortices, turbulence, and acoustics.

Dr. Beth Stroupe and her team at the Stroupe Lab in the Florida State University Microbiology Department are using big data to study a microscopic substance: the molecular structure of sulfite reductase, a central enzyme in the sulfur metabolic cycle. Learning about sulfite reductase will teach basic principles about how enzymes catalyze this type of chemical reaction, which is called an electron transfer reaction.

In the era of big data, the dissemination and management of scientific information is becoming an increasing challenge for researchers. The [Institute for Digital Information and Scientific Communication](http://idiginfo.org) (iDigInfo) at the College of Communication and Information is a new Research Institute at Florida State University aiming to make a dent in that challenge. To that end, iDigInfo and its director, Greg Riccardi, have been a major part of several national research grants.

Using the Florida State Research Computing Center’s High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster and some innovative modeling algorithms, Dr. Yang and his team have not only achieved long-timescale biological simulations, but have also shown that it can be done using commodity hardware and standard software tools. These techniques will enable much more research to be done much more cheaply by many more scientists.

Dr. Steve Morey is no stranger to conducting large-scale research. Very large-scale. A physical oceanographer at the Center for Ocean and Atmospheric Prediction Studies, Morey has been able to generate ocean topography models, study how currents affect fisheries and explore effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.