NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

The Once and Future Climate

Join Gil Compo as he discusses the 20th Century Reanalysis Project in a special webinar celebrating NERSC's 50th anniversary. » Read More

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

Now Playing

Some Scientific Computing Now in Progress at NERSC

Project System Nodes Node Hours Used
Large scale simulations of materials for quantum information science
 ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge
 PI: Giulia Galli, University of Chicago
perlmutter 512
Energy Exascale Earth System Modeling (E3SM)
 Biological & Environmental Research
 PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
perlmutter 512
SciDAC-5: Enabling Cosmic Discoveries in the Exascale era
 High Energy Physics
 PI: Salman Habib, Argonne National Laboratory
perlmutter 128
Particle Dark Matter Across Scales
 High Energy Physics
 PI: Benjamin Safdi, University of California Berkeley
perlmutter 128
Lattice QCD Monte Carlo Calculation of Hadronic Structure and Spectroscopy
 Nuclear Physics
 PI: Keh-Fei Liu, University of Kentucky
perlmutter 128
Structure and Reactions of Hadrons and Nuclei; Non-perturbative Solutions of Strongly Interacting Particles and Nuclei
 Nuclear Physics
 PI: James Vary, Iowa State University
perlmutter 124

Did You Know?

When Did NERSC Start Naming Systems in Honor of Scientists?

T3E 900

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.