Improved methods for the study of hadronic physics from lattice QCD

The solution of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) on a lattice provides a first-principles method for understanding QCD in the low-energy regime, and is thus an essential tool for nuclear physics. The generation of gauge configurations, the starting point for lattice calculations, requires the most powerful leadership-class computers available. However, to fully exploit such leadership-class computing requires increasingly sophisticated methods for obtaining physics observables from the underlying gauge ensembles. In this paper, we describe a variety of recent methods that have been used to advance our understanding of the spectrum and structure of hadrons through lattice QCD.