About NERSC

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the flagship scientific computing facility for the Office of Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. As one of the largest facilities in the world devoted to providing computational resources and expertise for basic scientific research, NERSC is a world leader in accelerating scientific discovery through computation. NERSC is located at Berkeley Lab in Berkeley, California.

The more than 2000 computational scientists who use NERSC perform basic scientific research across a wide range of disciplines. These disciplines include climate modelling, research into new materials, simulations of the early universe, analysis of data from high energy physics experiments, investigations of protein structure, and a host of other scientific endeavors. A survey of scientific research performed at NERSC can be found in the NERSC Annual Reports.

NERSC is known as one of the best run scientific computing facilities in the world. While NERSC provides some of the largest computing and storage systems available anywhere, what distinguishes NERSC is its success in creating an environment that makes these resources effective for scientific research. NERSC systems are reliable and secure, and provide a state-of-the-art scientific development environment with the tools needed by the diverse community of NERSC users. NERSC provides intellectual services that allows computational scientists to be more effective -- consultants who are experts in computational science and performance tuning, visualization assistance, training, customized support, and other services.

• Seaborg, a 6,656-processor IBM RS/6000 SP based on POWER3+ CPUs. Seaborg has a peak performance of 10 teraflop/s, making it one of the most powerful computers for unclassified research in the world. Seaborg has 7.8 terabytes of aggregate memory and a Global Parallel File System with 44 terabytes of storage.
• PDSF, a 390-processor Linux cluster with 35 TB of online storage used by the high energy physics community for data intensive analysis and simulations. PDSF has been in production longer than any other Linux cluster in the world, undergoing several hardware upgrades sinces it went online in 1998.
• HPSS Mass storage. The NERSC HPSS system archives more than 1 petabyte (1 petabyte = 1000 terabytes = 1 million gigabytes) of data in XXX files. The system has an 8.8 petabyte capacity using current tape technology. HPSS sustains an average transfer rate of more than 100 MB/s, 24 hours per day, with peaks to 450 MB/s, to and from NERSC computational systems and to and from sources outside NERSC, such as scientific experiments.

Access to NERSC from anywhere in the U.S. or the world is available through ESnet, which provides OC-48 bandwidth to NERSC (2.5 gigabits per second [Gb/s]), OC-192 bandwidth on major backbone links (10 Gb/s), and OC-3 (155 Mb/s) and OC-12 (622 Mb/s) links over much of the rest of its coverage area.