NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

Exploring NERSC's Mission and Impact at APS

NERSC is featured in a video at this week’s American Physical Society annual meeting. » Read More

Getting a Peek Into Ice Giants

Scientists are using NERSC's Perlmutter supercomputer to study the interior chemistry of ice giant planets like our solar system's Neptune. » Read More

50 Years of NERSC Firsts

Get the highlights from our last half-century of scientific supercomputing. » Read More

Revealing the Reaction Behind Salt-Based Nuclear Reactors

Using computing resources at NERSC, researchers have revealed how electrons interact with ions of molten salts, providing insights into the processes that could occur inside salt-based nuclear reactors. » Read More

NERSC Turns 50 in 2024

Did you know NERSC got its start in fusion energy research? Learn more about our unique history and join us in celebrating half a century of energizing scientific enlightenment through computing. » Read More

Shining a Light on Microbial Dark Matter

NERSC collaborations help illuminate Earth’s biodiversity. » Read More

Perlmutter Supports Gravitational Lensing System Modeled on GPUs

A team of researchers has modeled a rare instance of strong gravitational lensing known as an Einstein Cross. It’s likely the first such model run on GPUs. » Read More

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

NERSC is the mission scientific computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the nation’s single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.

Computing at NERSC

Now Playing

Some Scientific Computing Now in Progress at NERSC

Project System Nodes Node Hours Used
Lattice QCD Monte Carlo Calculation of Hadronic Structure and Spectroscopy
 Nuclear Physics
 PI: Keh-Fei Liu, University of Kentucky
perlmutter 128
Data Driven and First Principles Simulations of Chiral Matter
 Basic Energy Sciences
 PI: Amartya Banerjee, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
perlmutter 96
Computational studies in plasma physics and fusion energy
 Fusion Energy Sciences
 PI: Abhay Ram, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
perlmutter 96
High-Latitude Application and Testing (HiLAT) of Earth System Models & Regional Arctic System Model
 Biological & Environmental Research
 PI: Hailong Wang, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
perlmutter 73
Optimization studies of LBNF neutrino beamline and hadron absorber complex
 ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge
 PI: Igor Rakhno, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
perlmutter 64
The mechanisms, impacts, and predictability of extreme El Ni?o events in E3SM and other Earth system models: quantifying the role of westerly wind bursts
 Biological & Environmental Research
 PI: Alexey Fedorov, Yale University
perlmutter 58

Did You Know?

NERSC Resources Have Played a Part in Six Nobel Prize Winning Discoveries

George Smoot

George Smoot

Six Nobel Prize-winning researchers or teams have used NERSC resources in their work, including two Berkeley Lab astrophysicists who made breakthrough discoveries about the nature of the universe.

George Smoot, professor of physics at UC Berkeley and an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab, won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics for his cosmic microwave background radiation data analysis. Smoot used NERSC supercomputers to confirm predictions of the Big Bang theory.

Saul Perlmuter

Saul Perlmutter

Saul Perlmutter, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley and a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his 1998 discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. He confirmed his observations by running thousands of simulations at NERSC, and his research team is believed to have been the first to use supercomputers to analyze and validate observational data in cosmology. Our flagship high performance computing system is named Perlmutter in his honor.