NERSC's Mission Statement

NERSC's mission is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery in the DOE Office of Science community by providing high-performance computing, information, data, and communications services. NERSC is the principal provider of high performance computing services to Office of Science programs — Magnetic Fusion Energy, High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics, Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, and Advanced Scientific Computing Research.

Computing is a tool as vital as experimentation and theory in solving the scientific challenges of the twenty-first century. Fundamental to the mission of NERSC is enabling computational science of scale, in which large, interdisciplinary teams of scientists attack fundamental problems in science and engineering that require massive calculations and have broad scientific and economic impacts. Examples of these problems include global climate modeling, combustion modeling, magnetic fusion, astrophysics, computational biology, and many more.

NERSC has a threefold strategy for increasing researchers' productivity:

• Science-Driven Systems — Balanced introduction of the best new technologies for complete computational systems — computing, storage, networking, visualization and analysis — coupled with the activities necessary to engage vendors in addressing the DOE computational science requirements in their future roadmaps.
• Science-Driven Services — The entire range of support activities, from high-quality operations and user services to direct scientific support, that enable a broad range of scientists to effectively use NERSC systems in their research. NERSC concentrates on resources needed to realize the promise of the new highly scalable architectures for scientific discovery in multidisciplinary computational science projects.
• Science-Driven Analytics — The architectural and systems enhancements and services required to integrate NERSC's powerful computational and storage resources to provide scientists with new tools to effectively manage, manipulate, visualize, and analyze the huge data sets derived from simulations and experiments.