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TheNational Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is ahigh-performance computing (supercomputer) research facility that was founded in 1974. TheNational User Facility is operated byLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for theUnited States Department of EnergyOffice of Science.
The mission is to establish a computing center for the Office of Science, NERSC houses high performance computing and data systems which can be used by 9,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities around the country. Research at NERSC is focused on fundamental and applied research withenergy efficiency, storage, generation and Earth systems science, understanding of fundamental forces of nature and the Universe. The largest research areas are High Energy Physics, Materials Science, Chemical Sciences, Climate and Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Physics, and Fusion Energy research.[citation needed]
NERSC was founded in 1974 as the Controlled Thermonuclear Research Computer Center, or CTRCC, atLawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The center was created to provide computing resources to the fusion energy research community and began with aControl Data Corporation 6600 computer (SN-1). The first machine procured directly by the center was aCDC 7600, installed in 1975 with a peak performance of 36 megaflop/s (36 million floating point operations per second). In 1976, the center was renamed the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center.[citation needed]
Subsequent supercomputers include aCray-1 (SN-6), which was installed in May 1978 and called the "c" machine. In 1985, the world's firstCray-2 (SN-1) was installed as the "b" machine. The bubbles visible in the fluid of the Cray-2's direct liquid cooling system earned it the nickname "Bubbles."[citation needed]
In 1983, the center began providing a small portion of its resources to researchers outside the fusion community. As the center increasingly supported science across many research areas, it changed its name to the National Energy Research Supercomputer Center in 1990.[citation needed]
In 1995, the Department of Energy (DOE) moved NERSC from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory toLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A cluster ofCray J90 systems was installed in Berkeley before the main systems at Livermore were shut down for the move in 1996 to provide continuous support for the research community. As a part of the move, the center was renamed the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, but kept the NERSC acronym. In 2000, NERSC moved to a new site in Oakland to accommodate the growing footprint of air-cooled supercomputers.[citation needed]
In November 2015, NERSC moved back to the main Berkeley Lab site and is housed inShyh Wang Hall, an energy-efficient supercomputer facility.[1][2] The building was financed by theUniversity of California which manages Berkeley Lab for theU.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As with the move from LLNL, a new system was first installed in Berkeley before the machines inOakland were taken down and moved. The utility infrastructure and computer systems are provided by the DOE.[citation needed]
The center names its major systems after scientists.
The newest supercomputerPerlmutter, is named afterSaul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab who shared the 2011Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to research showing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. It is aCray system based on the Shasta architecture, withZen 3 basedAMD EpycCPUs ("Milan") andNVIDIA AmpereGPUs.[3] Perlmutter debuted in 2021 and is ranked 5th on theTOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers. The upcoming supercomputer is named afterJennifer Doudna, co-recipient of the 2020Nobel Prize in Chemistry.[4]
NERSC's previous flagship supercomputer was Cori, named afterGerty Cori, abiochemist who was the first American woman to receive aNobel Prize in science. Cori was aCray XC40 system with 622,336 Intel processor cores and a theoretical peak performance of 30petaflop/s (30 quadrillion operations per second). Cori was delivered in two phases. The first phase—also known as the Data Partition—was installed in late 2015 and comprised 12 cabinets and more than 1,600Intel Xeon "Haswell" compute nodes. The second phase[5] of Cori, installed in summer 2016,[6] added 52 cabinets and more than 9,300 nodes with second-generationIntel Xeon Phi processors (code-named Knights Landing, or KNL for short), making Cori in its day the largest[citation needed] supercomputing system for open science based on KNL processors.
NERSC also houses a 200+petabyte[7]High Performance Storage System (HPSS) forarchivalmass storage, in use since 1998.
NERSC facilities are accessible through theEnergy Sciences Network, or ESnet, which is also managed byLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the Department of Energy.
NERSC staff lead projects in computational science while also helping prepare the broader research community for theexascale era.
NESAP: The NERSC Exascale Science Applications Program partners with code teams and library and tool developers to prepare applications to use Cori's manycore architecture. Researchers prepare application codes for the new architecture. The NESAP partnership allows 20 projects to collaborate with NERSC, Cray, andIntel by providing access to early hardware, training, and preparation sessions with Intel and Cray staff. Eight of those 20 projects will also have an opportunity for apostdoctoral researcher to investigate computational science issues associated with energy-efficient many-core systems.
Shifter: Shifter is anopen-source software tool based onDocker containers that enables NERSC users to analyze datasets from experimental facilities. Such containers allow an application to be packaged with its entire software stack—including some portions of the baseOS files—as well as defining userenvironment variables andapplication "entry point".
HPC4Mfg (High Performance Computing for Manufacturing): NERSC is one of three DOE supercomputing centers working to create an ecosystem that allows experts at national laboratories to work directly with manufacturing industry members to teach them how to adopt or advance their use of high performance computing (HPC) to address manufacturing challenges with a goal of increasing energy efficiency, reducingenvironmental impacts and advancingclean energy technologies. The project is led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
In 2021 NERSC was acknowledged in more than 2,000 referenced scientific journal publications. Six Nobel Prize winning individuals or teams have used NERSC in their research.[citation needed]
In 2022, NERSC supported nearly 9,000 users from universities, national labs, and industries and has users in 50 US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and 45 countries.[citation needed] NERSC supported researchers from 514 colleges and universities, 26 Department of Energy National Laboratories, 52 organizations in industry, 31 small businesses, 115 other government labs, and 19 non-profit organizations.[citation needed]
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| Under Secretary of Energy for Infrastructure | Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, & Energy Response | |
| Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security | ||
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| Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy | ||
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| National Laboratory System | ||
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