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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

OURSYSTEMS DOCUMENTATIONFOR USERS CENTERSTATUS APPLY TOUSE NERSC

Now Computing

Some of the science now being computed at NERSC

Numbers not changing? Check the center status page for information.

Project	System	Nodes
A Digital Twin for Spatiotemporal experiments Basic Energy Sciences PI: Subramanian Sankaranarayanan, Argonne National Laboratory	perlmutter	400
The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon High Energy Physics PI: Aida El-Khadra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	perlmutter	384
Unitary Quantum Lattice Algorithms for Maxwell Equations in Media Fusion Energy Sciences PI: George Vahala, College of William & Mary	perlmutter	256
Extreme Moist Transport Events as a Driver of Arctic Amplification Advanced Scientific Computing Research PI: Nicole Feldl, University of California Santa Cruz	perlmutter	143
Center for Predictive Simulation of Functional Materials Basic Energy Sciences PI: Panchapakesan Ganesh, Oak Ridge National Laboratory	perlmutter	54
Lattice Gauge Theory Simulations High Energy Physics PI: Donald Sinclair, Argonne National Laboratory	perlmutter	48

Did You Know?

When did NERSC start naming flagship systems in honor of scientists?

Three black monolith-like cabinets dominate a fish-eye view of a data center.

This Cray T3E 900 was the first in a long line of NERSC flagship systems 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 Gigaflop/s). At the time, it was the nation’s most powerful supercomputer for unclassified research.