About NERSC
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary 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 a division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, located in Berkeley, California. NERSC itself is located at the UC Oakland Scientific Facility in Oakland, California.
More than 5,000 scientists use NERSC to perform basic scientific research across a wide range of disciplines, including climate modeling, 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.
The NERSC Hopper system, a Cray XE6 with a peak theoretical performance of 1.29 Petaflop/s. To highlight its mission, powering scientific discovery, NERSC names its systems for distinguished scientists. Grace Hopper was a pioneer in the field of software development and programming languages and the creator of the first compiler. Throughout her career she was a champion for increasing the usability of computers understanding that their power and reach would be limited unless they were made to be more user friendly. (Historical photo of Grace Hopper courtesy of the Hagley Museum & Library, PC20100423_201. Design: Caitlin Youngquist/LBNL Photo: Roy Kaltschmidt/LBNL)
NERSC is known as one of the best-run scientific computing facilities in the world. It provides some of the largest computing and storage systems available anywhere, but what distinguishes the center 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 offers scientists intellectual services that empower them to be more effective researchers. For example, many of our consultants are themselves domain scientists in areas such as material sciences, physics, chemistry and astronomy, well-equipped to help researchers apply computational resources to specialized science problems.
All research projects that are funded by the DOE Office of Science and require high performance computing support are eligible to apply to use NERSC resources. Projects that are not funded by the DOE Office of Science, but that conduct research that supports the Office of Science mission may also apply.
