The National Science Foundation recently awarded a grant totaling $10.5 million to a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, 1205 W. Clark St. The grant was awarded to develop new software that will organize data.

It will work with digital scientific data from fields including biology, geoscience, engineering and social science.

NCSA spokeswoman Tricia Barker said organizing this data, especially in the world of science, is important.

The software will work with mass amounts of data, Barker said. It will make data in different formats accessible and allow researchers to keep their data in context, which makes it more useful for their research.

Faculty from the University will partner with the NCSA and faculty from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Boston University for the software’s development.

The project will be lead by Kenton McHenry, the leader of the NCSA’s Image and Spatial Data Analysis division.

Students may have an opportunity to work on the development of the software, but the more immediate effect will be on the world of researchers, Barker said.