NERSC’s next flagship supercomputer, named in honor of Nobelist Jennifer Doudna, will feature two different storage systems to meet the broad and growing needs of science. - Credit: Margie Wylie, Berkeley Lab (This work is a derivative of “Jennifer Doudna by Christopher Michel in 2023,” used under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.)
In celebration of a partnership that could revolutionize the field of data storage in scientific computing, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and VAST Data have been recognized with an HPCwire Editors’ Choice Award for Best HPC Collaboration. Representatives from both organizations will accept the award at the 2025 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC25) in St. Louis, Missouri.
VAST Data is partnering with NERSC to provide next-generation storage solutions for NERSC’s upcoming supercomputer, Doudna, due in 2027. The setup will offer storage performance up to five times faster than NERSC’s current system, as well as performance guarantees for time-sensitive science.
VAST Data’s forward-looking AI Operating System is designed to bring data storage, database, compute, messaging, and reasoning capabilities together into a single, data-centric infrastructure built from the ground up for AI and agentic workflows. The system will allow NERSC to provide deadline-dependent workloads with performance guarantees through either persistent or schedulable performance. The seamless service will particularly benefit science teams whose workflows call for time-constrained analysis, such as those taking readings and gathering data via telescopes, particle accelerators, and other experimental infrastructure.
HPCwire chose to recognize the partnership due to its forward-looking nature, and stated: “NERSC and VAST have come together with the Doudna project, which transforms storage from a static repository into a dynamic, workload-intelligent fabric that seamlessly adapts to the real-time, data-intensive demands of next-generation science. The effort is expected to accelerate breakthroughs across fields like fusion energy, genomics, astrophysics, and quantum simulation by enabling real-time, data-driven science at unprecedented scale.”
“We are excited to win this award that recognizes the innovative nature of the Doudna machine at NERSC and in particular the collaboration with VAST,” said Nick Wright, Chief Architect of Doudna. “The VAST filesystem will provide support for deadline-driven science as well as providing new capabilities for the increasingly large AI workload at NERSC.”
The annual HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors. The awards are an annual feature of the publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community. HPCwire is a news site and weekly newsletter covering the issues, opportunities, challenges, and community developments relevant to the global HPC space. Its reporting covers the vendors, technologies, users, and the uses of high performance, AI- and data-intensive computing within academia, government, science, and industry.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the mission 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.
Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), NERSC serves 11,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials sciences, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. An average of 2,000 peer-reviewed science results a year rely on NERSC resources and expertise, which has also supported the work of seven Nobel Prize-winning scientists and teams.
NERSC is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.
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