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NERSC Center News

NERSC's Hopper Breaks Petaflops Barrier

November 14, 2010

The Department of Energy's NERSC is now home to the fifth most powerful computer in the world and the second most powerful in the United States, according to the latest edition of the TOP500 list. NERSC's newest supercomputer, a 153,408 processor-core Cray XE6 system, posted a top performance of 1.05 petaflops. Read More »

Kathy Yelick named Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences

September 15, 2010

Kathy Yelick has been named Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences. Yelick has been the director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) since 2008, a position she will continue to hold. Read More »

Metagenomics on a Cloud

June 30, 2010

One goal of the Magellan project is to understand which science applications and user communities are best suited for science cloud computing, in fact some DOE metagenomics researchers have already given public clouds a whirl. Their preliminary findings about the strengths and limitations of commercial cloud computing platforms will be extremely valuable as DOE explores cloud computing for science. Read More »

NERSC and HDF Group Optimize HDF5 Library to Improve I/O Performance

June 28, 2010

A common complaint among air travelers on short trips is that the time it takes to get in and out of the airplane and airports can be as long as the flight itself. In computer terms, that's a classic input/output (I/O) problem. Supercomputer users sometimes face a similar problem: the computer tears through the calculations with amazing speed, but the time it takes to write the resulting data to disk ends up slowing down the whole job. There are several layers of software that deal with… Read More »

Berkeley Lab Team Receives NASA Public Service Group Achievement Award

June 11, 2010

Three scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Computational Cosmology Center (C3) are being honored with a NASA Public Service Group Award for developing the supercomputing infrastructure for the U.S. Planck Team’s data and analysis operations at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Read More »

Grace Hopper Powers Science on NERSC's New Cray XE6

June 4, 2010

NERSC's new flagship petascale supercomputer will be named "Hopper" in honor of American computer scientist Grace Hopper. A pioneer in the field of software development and programming languages, Hopper created the first compiler. She was a champion for increasing the usability of computers, understanding that their power and reach would be limited unless they were made to be more user-friendly. Read More »

A New System at NERSC: Carver Goes into Production

May 28, 2010

A new system is in production at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Built on IBM iDataPlex technology, the new system is called "Carver" in honor of American scientist and inventor George Washington Carver. Read More »

NERSC and JGI Join Forces to Tackle Genomics HPC

April 19, 2010

To ensure that there is a robust computational infrastructure for managing, storing and gleaning scientific insights from this ever-growing flood of data, JGI is joining forces with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Division (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which serves more than 3,500 science users annually who are researching problems in a variety of disciplines from combustion to climate. Read More »

Magellan Explores Cloud Computing for DOE's Scientific Mission

March 30, 2010

Cloud computing is gaining traction in the commercial world, with companies like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo offering pay-to-play cycles to help organizations meet cyclical demands for extra computing power. But can such an approach also meet the computing and data storage demands of the nation's scientific community? Read More »

Hopper (Phase 1) Prepares NERSC for Petascale Computing

February 26, 2010

After several months of rigorous scientific testing, the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has accepted a 5,312-core Cray XT5 machine, called Hopper (Phase 1). Read More »

Historic Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Data, Carried by ESnet, Lives on at NERSC

January 26, 2010

Tunneled 6,800 feet underground in Canada's Vale Inco Creighton mine, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) was designed to detect neutrinos produced by fusion reactions in the Sun. Although the observatory officially "switched off" in August 2006, a copy of all the data generated for and by the experiment will live on at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Read More »