Science as Art Competition to Honor Beauty in Discovery

To celebrate 50 years of beauty in discovery, users are invited to enter the NERSC 50th Anniversary Science as Art Competition. » Read More

Hunting for 'Cracks' in Physics' Standard Model

Sometimes the absence of a surprise moves science forward. » Read More

Boosting Carbon-Negative Building Materials

Locking greenhouse gases into building materials could store them safely for many years. Researchers using NERSC resources are advancing the science behind this idea. » Read More

Getting a Peek Into Ice Giants

Scientists are using NERSC's Perlmutter supercomputer to study the interior chemistry of ice giant planets like our solar system's Neptune. » Read More

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

NERSC is the mission scientific computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the nation’s single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.

Computing at NERSC

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Now Playing

Some Scientific Computing Now in Progress at NERSC

Project	System	Nodes
Energy Exascale Earth System Modeling (E3SM) Biological & Environmental Research PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)	perlmutter	512
Learning Aerosol-Cloud Interactions Across Scales ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge PI: Po-Lun Ma, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)	perlmutter	160
Detector Simulation of the ATLAS Detector on NERSC HPCs High Energy Physics PI: Paolo Calafiura, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory	perlmutter	128
Lattice QCD Monte Carlo Calculation of Hadronic Structure and Spectroscopy Nuclear Physics PI: Keh-Fei Liu, University of Kentucky	perlmutter	128
ECS in climate models: quantifying the uncertainties due to cloud feedback versus ocean heat uptake using a modeling hierarchy Biological & Environmental Research PI: Wei Cheng, University of Washington	perlmutter	85
Minerals for Energy Storage Basic Energy Sciences PI: Michael Whittaker, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory	perlmutter	64

Did You Know?

When Did NERSC Start Naming Systems in Honor of Scientists?

This Cray T3E 900 was the first in a long line of scientific supercomputers named for scientists.

Since NERSC moved to Berkeley Lab in 1996, the Department of Energy’s primary scientific computing facility has named all of its supercomputers after scientists.

The naming tradition started in the late 1990s with NERSC’s flagship Cray T3E system. It was called “MCurie” in honor of Marie Curie, the French-Polish physicist and chemist known for her pioneering research on radioactivity. In November 1997, MCurie was the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world. The system had 512 processors and a theoretical peak speed of 461 billion calculations per second (461 Gigaflops). At the time, it was the nation's biggest supercomputer for unclassified research.