A hypergraph is a general version of graph where the edges may connect any number of vertices. By this flexibility, hypergraphs has a larger modeling power that may allow accurate formulaion of many problems of combinatorial scientific computing. This thesis discusses the use of hypergraph-based approaches to solve problems that require data partitioning. The thesis is composed of three parts. In the first part, we show how to implement hypergraph partitioning efficiently using recursive graph bipartitioning. The remaining two parts show how to formulate two important data partitioning problems in parallel computing as hypergraph partitioning. The first problem is global inverted index partitioning for parallel query processing and the second one is row-columnwise sparse matrix partitioning for parallel matrix vector multiplication, where both multiplication and sparse matrix partitioning schemes has novelty. In this thesis, we show that hypergraph models achieve partitions with better quality.