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NERSC Center News

NERSC's Lenny Oliker Co-Authors "Best Paper of SC99"

November 30, 1999

Leonid "Lenny" Oliker, a post-doctoral fellow in NERSC's Scientific Computing Group, was co-recipient of the "Best Paper of SC99" award at SC99, the annual conference on high-performance computing and networking. Read More »

DOE Establishes Probe Testbed for Storage-Intensive Applications

October 12, 1999

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- Today's scientific researchers are generating staggering volumes of data, with data sources ranging from computational simulations of global and regional climate, to digital instrumentation of physical experiments and satellite imagery. Add projects such as human genome mapping, with massive demands for rapid user access, and it's easy to see why strategies for optimizing data storage and retrieval are vital for research laboratories. The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge… Read More »

NERSC Offers More Powerful Computer Resources to Researchers

September 8, 1999

In late August, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) officially accepted an array of three SGI/Cray SV1 supercomputers after a month of testing. The new SV1 computers perform, on average, three times  as fast as the Cray J90se machines they replace. According to SGI/Cray, NERSC was one of the first centers to receive certified production models of the SV1. "These SV1 supercomputer will aid our scientific users in their work on some of the most important problems… Read More »

NERSC Celebrates 25 Years of Computing

July 7, 1999

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) this year marks its 25th anniversary of providing scientific computing resources to scientists studying problems such as combustion, global climate change, fusion energy, computational biology, materials science, high-energy and nuclear physics, and environmental remediation. The center started out as the Controlled Thermonuclear Research Computer Center and was later renamed the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center and… Read More »

New IBM RS/6000 System Rolls into NERSC Machine Room

July 2, 1999

Phase 1 of the NERSC-3 procurement rolled into Berkeley Lab on Saturday, June 26. Nearly filling three North American Van Lines trailers, the system consisted of 60 cabinets, cartons and crates with a total weight of 35,603 pounds. The crew of North American, IBM and NERSC staffers unloaded the equipment in about three hours, then moved it from the loading area to the first-floor machine room in Bldg. 50B. There, another group of workers positioned the 23 cabinets and connected them to seismic… Read More »

NERSC Picks IBM System for Next-Generation Supercomputer with 3 Trillion Calculations per Second Capability

April 28, 1999

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory today (April 28) announced that it has selected an IBM RS/6000 SP system as the center's next-generation supercomputer. Read More »

NERSC Achieves Breakthrough 93% Utilization on Cray T3E

April 19, 1999

The NERSC Computational Systems Group last week completed the final acceptance tests for the Cray T3E, completing an almost two-year effort to meet all conditions of the original purchase agreement. Key to completing the tests was the successful implementation of SGI's "psched" scheduling daemon. With all the features of psched running, and with NQS and "prime job" control scripts written by Computational Systems Group staff, the T3E has posted utilization figures of more than 93 percent, a… Read More »

NERSC Presents Computational Science Lecture Series in D.C.

March 30, 1999

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE national user facility, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are presenting a series of colloquia on some of the more exciting and promising areas of computational science. NERSC, originally established in 1974, provides computing resources to 2,500 users and also advances research in such areas as combustion, climate change, computational biology, materials science, data intensive computing and fusion energy. The… Read More »

Energy Department to Broaden Peer Review for Use of its Largest Unclassified Computer Center

February 22, 1999

The U.S. Department of Energy today announced a new policy of broader scientific peer review for the use of its largest unclassified scientific computing facility, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). To advance the role of computing in DOE's scientific research programs, the department will also establish a new Policy Board to help chart the future of the facility. 

The scientific computing center, currently home to seven SGI/Cray supercomputers, is located at… Read More »

Forbes ASAP Picks Berkeley Lab Visualization as Cover Image to Illustrate Power of Supercomputers

February 22, 1999

An image created by Wes Bethel of the NERSC Visualization Group and Ken Downing of Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division graces the Feb. 22 cover of Forbes ASAP, a quarterly supplement to Forbes magazine. The image shows two different representations of the protein actin. The 96-page issue of ASAP is devoted to supercomputers, past, present and future. Other images produced by the Viz Group are used in the print version, too, but don't show up in the web edition. ASAP reporter Scott Lajoie… Read More »

Future Technologies Group Gets Four-Year Funding for Cluster Work

January 4, 1999

The DOE Office of Science announced just before Christmas that it will sponsor a proposal by NERSC's Future Technologies Group (FTG) to develop software for high performance clusters. The research project, a collaboration between LBNL, the Intel Corporation Enterprise Server Group, and Argonne National Lab, will investigate applications and extensions of the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA), a hardware/software standard for high performance communication in clusters. The project is funded… Read More »