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

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

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Now Playing

Some Scientific Computing Now in Progress at NERSC

Project	System	Nodes
Energy Exascale Earth System Modeling (E3SM) Biological & Environmental Research PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)	perlmutter	512
Lattice QCD search for physics beyond the standard model High Energy Physics PI: Rajan Gupta, Los Alamos National Laboratory	perlmutter	96
Machine Learning to model the full space of chemical biology and drug discovery with quantum-mechanical accuracy Advanced Scientific Computing Research PI: Thomas Miller, Entos Inc.	perlmutter	64
High-Latitude Application and Testing (HiLAT) of Earth System Models & Regional Arctic System Model Biological & Environmental Research PI: Hailong Wang, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)	perlmutter	57
Water Cycle and Climate Extremes Modeling (WACCEM) Biological & Environmental Research PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)	perlmutter	47
Toward exascale computing of electron-phonon couplings for finite-temperature materials design Basic Energy Sciences PI: Feliciano Giustino, University of Texas at Austin	perlmutter	40

Did You Know?

When Did NERSC Start Naming Systems in Honor of Scientists?

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.