NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

David Baker Wins Nobel Prize for Chemistry

David Baker, a computational biologist and professor of biochemistry, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, and prolific user of the systems at NERSC, has been awarded a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in computational protein design. » Read More

Quantum Computing Partnership Extended

After a successful first year punctuated by strong scientific results, NERSC’s partnership with QuEra Computing has been extended. » Read More

Magnifying Deep Space Through the 'Carousel Lens'

Using the Perlmutter supercomputer, DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, researchers identified a rare and revealing gravitational lens. » Read More

Got What it Takes to be a Grace Hopper Postdoctoral Fellow?

Applications are now open. » Read More

Tropical Cyclones Intensify Due to Warming Atmosphere

Tropical cyclones have grown more intense near global coastal regions. A new study found that hotter air interacting with humidity and wind shear is likely the culprit. » 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
The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon
 High Energy Physics
 PI: Aida El-Khadra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
perlmutter 384
Proton GPDs from lattice QCD using asymmetric frames
 Nuclear Physics
 PI: Martha Constantinou, Temple University
perlmutter 256
Relativistic quantum dynamics in the non-equilibrium regime
 Basic Energy Sciences
 PI: Albert De Prince, Florida State University
perlmutter 150
Continuing studies of plasma based accelerators
 High Energy Physics
 PI: Frank Tsung, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
perlmutter 128
Lattice QCD Monte Carlo Calculation of Hadronic Structure and Spectroscopy
 Nuclear Physics
 PI: Keh-Fei Liu, University of Kentucky
perlmutter 128
Energy Exascale Earth System Modeling (E3SM)
 Biological & Environmental Research
 PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
perlmutter 96

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.