As a national resource to enable scientific advances to support the missions of the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), operated by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, annually serves about 3,100 scientists throughout the United States.  These researchers work at DOE laboratories, universities, industrial laboratories and other Federal agencies.  Computational science conducted at NERSC covers the entire range of scientific disciplines, but is focused on research that supports DOE's missions and scientific goals.

Allocations of computer time and archival storage at NERSC are awarded to research groups based on a review of submitted proposals.  As proposals are submitted, they are subjected to peer review to evaluate the quality of science, the relevance of the proposed research to Office of Science goals and objectives and the readiness of the proposed application to fully utilize the computing resources being requested.

A prominent feature of NERSC since its founding in 1974 has been the expertise and the competence of the employees staffing the facility and the high quality services delivered to users.  The NERSC staff delivers critical computing resources, applications and information to enable users to optimize the utilization of their allocations on the high performance systems at NERSC.

NERSC is upgrading Franklin, its Cray XT-4-based system, with quad core chips.  During its upgrade, Franklin will be available to users as business as usual. When completed, Franklin will have nearly 40,000 processors (click here for more information on NERSC Franklin)

Summary Report of the NERSC Programmatic Review
May 17-19, 2005  310k PDF file