National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)

NERSC banner

The NERSC is the mission high performance computing facility for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and is a world leader in accelerating scientific discovery through computation.

Berkeley, California Location
1996 Start of Operations
10,278 (FY 2023) Number of Users

Description

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is the mission high performance scientific computing resource for researchers directly supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (SC). NERSC recently celebrated its 50th Anniversary, tracing its origins to the mid-1970s as a supercomputer that initially supported fusion energy sciences. Now managed by the office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), NERSC has since then expanded its reach by becoming the primary supercomputing resource for SC-funded research. NERSC’s latest system, Perlmutter – named after Nobel-prize winning astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, is a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Cray EX supercomputer boasting peak double-precision performance of 113 petaflops (or 113 quadrillion operations per second).

NERSC offers scientists integrated computational and storage resources and provides in-depth support to users through consulting and partnerships, which empower them to be more effective researchers. With over 11,000 users from universities, national laboratories and industry across the world, NERSC supports a large and active research community. The NERSC workload represents the wide variety of research performed by its users, including simulations that run at the largest scales available on the center’s world-class supercomputers, large-scale data analysis of experimental data, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Science

In 2024, over 1,100 research projects benefited from the high performance computing environment at NERSC. Some recent highlights include:

  • The 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to prolific NERSC user, David Baker, for his work in computational protein design. Since 2021, Baker’s team has used 1.5 million GPU hours on NERSC’s Perlmutter system for workflows including his latest AI-powered protein structure prediction tools. This work has led to at least eight major published papers acknowledging NERSC, on topics ranging from modeling protein-protein interactions that are key to biological processes to illuminating microbial “dark matter” through metagenomics.
  • Researchers for the Gordon Bell Prize-winning project “Breaking the Million-Electron and 1 EFLOP/s Barriers: Biomolecular-Scale Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Using MP2 Potentials” used Perlmutter to demonstrate a new approach to simulating complex biological phenomena with thousands of atoms with quantum accuracy. “Perlmutter played a critical role in scaling our ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations,” said PI Giuseppe Barca, “particularly for testing and refining the new algorithmic innovations that ultimately led to our record-breaking results”.
  • Scientists used NERSC’s Perlmutter supercomputer to analyze an abundance of new data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys and recent observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to identify a unique configuration of seven galaxies forming the most exquisitely aligned gravitational lens ever discovered. Known as the Carousel Lens, it offers researchers a powerful tool for exploring the universe.
  • Researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) used Perlmutter at NERSC to perform simulations confirming that new reactor designs reduce the production of extra radio waves, improving the efficiency of the fusion reaction.