Two new applications using massive computing power to harness the promise of big data are in the news today. This week marks the midpoint of this year’s hurricane season, and a massive supercomputer in the University of Texas at Austin is being used to input real time weather data from all over the world to predict extreme weather up to the minute. Another massive network, called Einstein@Home, has just discovered 24 new pulsars in the Milky Way galaxy by crunching data using 200,000 personal computers around the world.

Host Ben Johnson talks to Dr. Karl Schulz, director of the Scientific Applications at the University of Texas’ Advanced Computing Center, and physicist Bruce Allen, director of the Einstein@Home project, about the massive computer networks.