The SDSS Science Archive has attracted an unprecedented number of users, and is considered to be an example for online archives of the future. Currently, he is on the Science Advisory Council of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. A minor planet discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at Apache Point Observatory was named in his honor. Szalay is a leader in the grass-roots standardization effort to bring the next generation petascale databases in astronomy to a common basis, so that they will be interoperable. In support of this goal, Szalay was Project Director of the National Virtual Observatory. In 2001, Jim Gray and Szalay wrote up a viewpoint article on the national virtual observatory project for "Science", entitled "The World-Wide Telescope." He was also one of the founders of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance and part of the core team to build the Galaxy Zoo, one of the most visible citizen science projects today. Szalay collaborated with Simon White and Gerard Lemson to build a database similar to the SkyServer out of the Millennium Simulation, which became the reference cosmology simulation used by astronomers all over the world. In collaboration with Piero Madau, he is building the 1.2PB database, known as The Milky Way Laboratory, for the Silver River cosmology simulation, currently running at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Szalay was involved in the early projects related to the Computational Grid, in particular the GriPhyN and iVDGL projects, creating testbed applications for high energy physics and astrophysics. He has collaborated on high-speed data analytics for more than a decade, and has been part of the TeraFlow project since 2004  and the Open Science Grid. He was also heavily involved in the Data Conservancy, researching the long-term curation and preservation of scientific data. He has coauthored several papers with Gordon Bell, one of the world's premier computer designers, arguing how Amdahl's law can be used to revisit data-intensive computing architectures from first principles. Applying these ideas, he built a low power system, GrayWulf, using Atom processors with extremely good IO performance per unit power (factor of 15 better than a typical rack server). GrayWulf was named in homage to and builds on the work of Szalay's collaborator legendary Microsoft computer scientist Jim Gray and Beowulf, the “original computer cluster developed at NASA using ‘off-the-shelf’ computer hardware.” Szalay led the team that won the Supercomputing Data Challenge in SC-08 - the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis - with their entry "Storage Challenge GrayWulf: Scalable Clustered Architecture for Data-Intensive Computing."