Indiana University — once a relative unknown in technology circles — is poised to lead the next generation of supercomputing research in the United States.

The National Science Foundation has awarded IU a $10.1 million grant to run an experimental network of supercomputers dubbed FutureGrid. The four-year project will link a half-dozen universities across the country, allowing researchers to more precisely study topics such as climate change, pandemics and DNA.

Officials in Bloomington and Indianapolis are calling the award a victory for the underdog that has far-reaching implications for all of Indiana — including luring new businesses based on research into life sciences and information technology.

“It’s one of those eight-figure grants that we just used to watch go by,” said Brad Wheeler, IU’s vice president for information technology.

In the early 1990s, supercomputers were not on IU’s collective mind. However, that changed with a series of multi-million-dollar grants from the Lilly Endowment and a strategic plan that led to coveted roles in other high-speed networking projects such as Internet2 and I-Light.

IU is now a leader in supercomputing. It shares that status with the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California-San Diego; the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas-Austin; the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory; and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a joint venture of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

All of these universities, along with IU and Purdue University, are members of an earlier but still well-funded National Science Foundation project dubbed TeraGrid. It, too, exists to link supercomputers at universities for research. IU’s Big Red supercomputer is part of TeraGrid.

“TeraGrid (members) lead the industry of supercomputers,” said David Moses, executive director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

FutureGrid, with its experimental approach to networked supercomputing, one day could replace TeraGrid.

The difference between the two projects has to do with the flexibility of the supercomputers used and their data-processing capabilities.

TeraGrid supercomputers have specialties. A supercomputer based at one university, for example, may do calculations extremely fast. One at another university may be able to store vast amounts of data. Which supercomputer a researcher uses depends on what capabilities are needed for the research.

FutureGrid supercomputers, on the other hand, will leverage what’s called “cloud computing.” Researchers will be able to use the supercomputers as a group instead of individually because they will be networked in a way that increases their speed and power.

The goal, Wheeler said, is to create a supercomputing system that researchers can use without having to worry about the hardware design and its capabilities.

“It’s about different kinds of supercomputers,” he said. “Across very, very high-speed networks, we’ll be able to make them work together.”

Say the word “supercomputer,” and many people may think of omnipresent HAL 9000, from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

But in reality, supercomputers represent the ability to run applications that require complex calculations, simulations and data modeling.

Fifteen years ago, they were used for mathematical calculations and determining molecular structure. Today, researchers from various disciplines use supercomputers to model the spread of viruses such as H1N1 to determine how best to stop it, or figure out whether information available on the Internet can be used to predict someone’s Social Security number.

“If you understand where things are vulnerable, you can close the holes,” Moses said.

To have that kind of supercomputing power in Indiana at the disposal of researchers and, perhaps, companies will be invaluable, said David Johnson, president and CEO of BioCrossroads, a group set up to promote health and life-science businesses in Indiana.

He expects life-sciences companies to crop up based on research that’s done on supercomputers and driven by the digitization of health care.

Jim Jay, president and CEO of TechPoint, said the presence of FutureGrid will help build the state’s reputation as a hotbed for technology.

IU plans to buy eight supercomputers by this fall and have the entire FutureGrid network up and running by next summer. Five other schools, plus Purdue and the High Performance Computing Center at the Technical University in Germany, will provide additional processing power.

The FutureGrid team will be led by Geoffrey C. Fox, director of IU’s Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center. Some of the $10.1 million will be used to expand IU’s other supercomputers, including Big Red, which will be moved to the campus’s new Data Center.

“This is really the big leagues,” Wheeler said.