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
Lattice QCD Monte Carlo Calculation of Hadronic Structure and Spectroscopy
 Nuclear Physics
 PI: Keh-Fei Liu, University of Kentucky
perlmutter 200
Energy Exascale Earth System Modeling (E3SM)
 Biological & Environmental Research
 PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
perlmutter 96
Energy Conversion in Photosynthesis
 Basic Energy Sciences
 PI: Junko Yano, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
perlmutter 64
Water Cycle and Climate Extremes Modeling (WACCEM)
 Biological & Environmental Research
 PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
perlmutter 47
Self-interaction correction within the "FLOSIC" scheme
 Basic Energy Sciences
 PI: Adrienn Ruzsinszky, Temple University
perlmutter 42
The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon
 High Energy Physics
 PI: Aida El-Khadra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
perlmutter 32

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.