The coupling of the Standard Model top quark to the Higgs boson is O(1), which leads to large quantum corrections in the perturbative expansion of the Higgs boson mass. Possible solutions to this so-called naturalness problem include supersymmetric models with gluinos and stop squarks whose masses are at the electroweak scale, O(1 TeV). If supersymmetry is realised in nature at this scale, these particles are expected to be accessible with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. A search for gluino pair production with decays mediated by stop- and sbottom-squark loops in the initial 14.8 ifb of the ATLAS run 2 dataset is presented in terms of a pair of simplified models, which targets extreme regions of phase space using jet substructure techniques. No excess is observed and limits are set which greatly extend the previous exclusion region of this search, up to 1.9 TeV (1.95 TeV) for gluinos decaying through light stop (sbottom) squarks to the lightest neutralinos. A performance study of top tagging algorithms in the 20.3 ifb 2012 dataset is also presented, which includes the first measurements of substructure-based top tagging efficiencies and fake rates published by ATLAS, as well as a detailed comparison of tagger performance in simulation. A benchmarking study which compares commercially available cloud computing platforms for applications in High Energy Physics, and a summary of ATLAS liquid argon calorimeter data quality work focused on monitoring and characterising the sporadic phenomena of Mini Noise-Bursts in the electromagnetic barrel calorimeter are also included. / Graduate / 0798 / matt.leblanc@cern.ch