NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

50th Anniversary Seminar Series Kicks Off

Join us for a series of seminars celebrating NERSC's legacy and future in scientific supercomputing. » 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

NERSC Featured at APS

Watch a new video exploring NERSC's mission and impact. It was featured at the American Physical Society's annual meeting. » 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

50 Years of NERSC Firsts

Get the highlights from our last half-century of scientific supercomputing. » 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
Energy Exascale Earth System Modeling (E3SM)
 Biological & Environmental Research
 PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
perlmutter 512
First-Principles Catalyst Design for Environmentally Benign Energy Production
 Basic Energy Sciences
 PI: Manos Mavrikakis, University of Wisconsin - Madison
perlmutter 100
Hadron Structure from Lattice QCD
 Nuclear Physics
 PI: Kostas Orginos, College of William & Mary
perlmutter 84
Partnership Center for High-fidelity Boundary Plasma Simulation: SciDAC-4 Center
 Fusion Energy Sciences
 PI: Choongseok Chang, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL)
perlmutter 64
Water Cycle and Climate Extremes Modeling (WACCEM)
 Biological & Environmental Research
 PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
perlmutter 58
Simulating Hydroxide Diffusion in Anion Exchange Membranes
 Basic Energy Sciences
 PI: Robert A. DiStasio Jr., Cornell University
perlmutter 50

Did You Know?

Why NERSC9 Was Named Perlmutter

Saul PerlmutterSaul Perlmutter – a professor of physics at UC Berkeley and a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab – was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his 1998 discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. He confirmed his observations by running thousands of simulations at NERSC, and his research team is believed to have been the first to use supercomputers to analyze and validate observational data in cosmology. Our flagship high performance computing system is named Perlmutter in his honor.