National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

Edison, NERSC's Cray XC30 supercomputer.
Katherine Yelick, former Director of NERSC, in front of Hopper Cray XE6.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, or NERSC for short, is a High Performance Computing (supercomputer) user facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Energy Office of Science. It contains several cluster supercomputers, the largest of which is Edison, which was ranked 18th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers in June 2014. It is located in Berkeley, California.

History

NERSC was founded in 1974 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, then called the Controlled Thermonuclear Research Computer Center or CTRCC and consisting of a Control Data Corporation 6600 computer. Over time, it expanded to contain a CDC 7600, then a Cray-1(SN-6) which was called the "c" machine, and in 1985 the world's first Cray-2(SN-1) which was the "b" machine, nicknamed bubbles because of the bubbles visible in the fluid of its unique direct liquid cooling system. In the early eighties, CTRCC's name was changed to the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center or NMFECC. The name was again changed in the early nineties to National Energy Research Supercomputer Center. In 1996 NERSC moved from LLNL to LBNL. In 2000, it was moved to its location in Oakland. As of November 2015, it is housed at Shyh Wang Hall in the Berkeley Hills.[1]

Computers and projects

NERSC's fastest computer, Edison,[2] is a Cray XC30 named in honor of Thomas Edison, an American inventor. It has 133,824 Intel processor cores 357 terabytes of memory and 7.6 petabytes of disk storage.

Other systems at NERSC are named Cori, Genepool and PDSF, the longest continually operating Linux cluster in the world. The facility also contains an 100 petabyte High Performance Storage System (HPSS) installation.

NERSC facilities are accessible through the Energy Sciences Network or ESnet, which is also located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

References

External links

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