Texas A&M University System and IBM announced an agreement that is the beginning of a broad research collaboration supported by one of the largest computational sciences infrastructure dedicated to advances in agriculture, geosciences and engineering. The collaboration will leverage the power of big data analytics and high performance computing (HPC) systems for innovative solutions across a spectrum of challenges, such as improving extraction of Earth-based energy resources, facilitating the smart energy grid, accelerating materials development, improving disease identification and tracking in animals, and fostering better understanding and monitoring of the global food supplies. IBM will provide the infrastructure for the joint research consisting of Blue Gene/Q technology, Power and System x servers, and General Parallel File Systems (GPFS) Storage Systems. A test of the Blue Gene/Q on campus found that it ran a material sciences problem that previously took weeks to solve and produced a solution in "a fraction of an hour" with much greater analytical depth.