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National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

Topic: Organization

 From HandWiki - Reading time: 7 min

Short description: Supercomputer facility operated by the US Department of Energy in Berkeley, California


Shyh Wang Hall, houses the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a high-performance computing (supercomputer) research facility that was founded in 1974. The National User Facility is operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy Office of Science.

Mission

History

In November 2015, NERSC moved back to the main Berkeley Lab site and is housed in Shyh Wang Hall, an energy-efficient supercomputer facility.[1][2] The building was financed by the University of California which manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As with the move from LLNL, a new system was first installed in Berkeley before the machines in Oakland were taken down and moved. The utility infrastructure and computer systems are provided by the DOE.

Computers

The center names its major systems after scientists.

The newest supercomputer Perlmutter, is named after Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to research showing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. It is a Cray system based on the Shasta architecture, with Zen 3 based AMD Epyc CPUs ("Milan") and NVIDIA Ampere GPUs.[3] Perlmutter debuted in 2021 and is ranked 5th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers. The upcoming supercomputer is named after Jennifer Doudna, co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.[4]

NERSC's previous flagship supercomputer was Cori, named after Gerty Cori, a biochemist who was the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science. Cori was a Cray XC40 system with 622,336 Intel processor cores and a theoretical peak performance of 30 petaflop/s (30 quadrillion operations per second). Cori was delivered in two phases. The first phase—also known as the Data Partition—was installed in late 2015 and comprised 12 cabinets and more than 1,600 Intel Xeon "Haswell" compute nodes. The second phase[5] of Cori, installed in summer 2016,[6] added 52 cabinets and more than 9,300 nodes with second-generation Intel Xeon Phi processors (code-named Knights Landing, or KNL for short), making Cori in its day the largest supercomputing system for open science based on KNL processors. NERSC also houses a 200+ petabyte[7] High Performance Storage System (HPSS) for archival mass storage, in use since 1998.

NERSC facilities are accessible through the Energy Sciences Network, or ESnet, which is also managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the Department of Energy.

Projects

NERSC staff lead projects in computational science while also helping prepare the broader research community for the exascale era.

NESAP: The NERSC Exascale Science Applications Program partners with code teams and library and tool developers to prepare applications to use Cori's manycore architecture. Researchers prepare application codes for the new architecture. The NESAP partnership allows 20 projects to collaborate with NERSC, Cray, and Intel by providing access to early hardware, training, and preparation sessions with Intel and Cray staff. Eight of those 20 projects will also have an opportunity for a postdoctoral researcher to investigate computational science issues associated with energy-efficient many-core systems.

Shifter: Shifter is an open-source software tool based on Docker containers that enables NERSC users to analyze datasets from experimental facilities. Such containers allow an application to be packaged with its entire software stack—including some portions of the base OS files—as well as defining user environment variables and application "entry point".

HPC4Mfg (High Performance Computing for Manufacturing): NERSC is one of three DOE supercomputing centers working to create an ecosystem that allows experts at national laboratories to work directly with manufacturing industry members to teach them how to adopt or advance their use of high performance computing (HPC) to address manufacturing challenges with a goal of increasing energy efficiency, reducing environmental impacts and advancing clean energy technologies. The project is led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

NERSC's user community and scientific impact

In 2021 NERSC was acknowledged in more than 2,000 referenced scientific journal publications. Six Nobel Prize winning individuals or teams have used NERSC in their research. In 2022, NERSC supported nearly 9,000 users from universities, national labs, and industries and has users in 50 US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and 45 countries. NERSC supported researchers from 514 colleges and universities, 26 Department of Energy National Laboratories, 52 organizations in industry, 31 small businesses, 115 other government labs, and 19 non-profit organizations.{{Citation needed|date=June 2023}

References

  1. ↑ "Less is More: LBNL Breaks New Ground in Data Center Optimization". https://cs.lbl.gov/news-media/news/2020/less-is-more-lbnl-breaks-new-ground-in-data-center-optimization/. 
  2. ↑ Weiner, Jon (2015-11-12). "Berkeley Lab Opens State-of-the-Art Facility for Computational Science" (in en-US). Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/11/12/facility-for-computational-science/. 
  3. ↑ "Perlmutter". https://www.nersc.gov/systems/perlmutter/. 
  4. ↑ Clark, Don (2025-05-29). "Energy Dept. Unveils Supercomputer That Merges With A.I." (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/technology/energy-department-supercomputer-ai.html. 
  5. ↑ "Cori Intel Xeon Phi (KNL) Nodes" (in en). http://www.nersc.gov/users/computational-systems/cori/configuration/cori-intel-xeon-phi-nodes/. 
  6. ↑ "Cori Supercomputer Now Fully Installed at Berkeley Lab" (in en). http://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/nersc-news/nersc-center-news/2016/cori-supercomputer-now-fully-installed-at-berkeley-lab/. 
  7. ↑ "About" (in en). http://www.nersc.gov/users/storage-and-file-systems/hpss/about/. 



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