National User Facilities

Berkeley Lab's User Facilities–Engines of Discovery

Berkeley Lab’s User Facilities provide state-of-the-art resources for scientists across the nation and around the world. About 10,000 researchers a year use these facilities, representing nearly one third of the total for all Department of Energy Office of Science User Facilities.

Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS) is an electron accelerator/storage ring that serves as one of the world’s premier sources of X-ray and ultraviolet light for scientific research ranging from advanced materials to protein crystallography and 3D biological imaging. As a DOE national user facility, the resources of the ALS are available to qualified users around the world, attracting more than 2000 researchers and students annually.

The Molecular Foundry is a DOE-funded program providing support to researchers from around the world whose work can benefit from or contribute to nanoscience. Through unparalleled access to state-of-the-art instruments, materials, technical expertise and training, the Foundry provides researchers with the tools to enhance the development and understanding of the synthesis, characterization and theory of nanoscale materials.

ESnet provides the high-bandwidth, reliable connections linking scientists at national laboratories, universities and other research institutions, enabling them to collaborate on some of the world’s most important scientific challenges including energy, climate science, and the origins of the universe. Funded by the DOE Office of Science, and managed and operated by Berkeley Lab, ESnet provides scientists with access to unique DOE research facilities and computing resources.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary scientific computing facility for DOE’s Office of Science and a world leader in accelerating scientific discovery through computation and data analysis. More than 5,000 scientists use NERSC to perform basic research across a wide range of disciplines, including climate modeling, high energy physics, new materials, simulations of the early universe and a host of other scientific endeavors.

The mission of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI) is to advance genomics in support of the missions related to clean energy generation and environmental characterization and cleanup. JGI provides integrated highthroughput sequencing and computational analysis that enable systems-based scientific approaches to these challenges.