Franklin, NERSC's Cray XT4, is among the largest machines on the list of Top 500 supercomputers in the world.
NERSC
is the flagship high performance scientific
computing facility for research sponsored by the U.S. Department
of Energy Office of Science.
NERSC, a national facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a world leader in providing resources and services that accelerate scientific discovery through computation.
A small sample of massively parallel scientific computing jobs running right now at NERSC.
The Discovery of Supervona SN2009av is depicted in this image from the PTF survey. The two images on the left show the portrait of a distant galaxy taken on different days. After computationally intensive searching and image manipulation algorithms have processed the data, the later picture is determined to have "extra" light, which manifests itself as the image of the newly discovered supernova. In the two frames on the right the supernova can be seen to have brightened from one image to the next.
A collaboration of scientists headquartered at Caltech has partnered with NERSC in a program expected to detect unprescedented numbers of powerful cosmic supernova explosions and other transient events. All these discoveries flow from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which combines the power of a wide-field telescope, a high-resolution camera and high-performance networking and computing. The survey is entering robotic mode, which will allow objects to be discovered nightly thanks to the computing power, data storage, and scientific support offered by NERSC. The survey already has discovered 40 supernova, like SN2009av shown in the image above. [More]