Behind the wall you are facing is one of the largest supercomputers in the world. NERSC, The National Energy Research Scientific Computing center, is the flagship unclassified scientific computing facility of the U.S. Department of Energy.
No classified work is done here (nearby Livermore Lab does plenty of that); more than 4000 scientists world-wide use NERSC to perform basic scientific research that includes climate modelling, simulations of the early universe, analysis of data from high energy physics experiments, investigations of protein structure, and many others.
NERSC resources include:
- Edison, A Cray XC30 with 124,800 compute cores and about 333 terabytes of memory, is NERSC's newest peta-flop system with a peak performance of nearly 2.4 petaflops. Edison features the Cray Aires high-speed interconnect, fast Intel processors, large memory per core, and a multi-petabyte local scratch file system. Of course, this system is named for American inventor Thomas Alva Edison
- Hopper, NERSC's first petaflop system named after Grace Murray Hopper, is a Cray XE6 with 153,216 compute cores, 217 TB of memory and 2PB of disk. Hopper placed number 5 on the November 2010 Top500 Supercomputer list making it one of the most powerful computers for unclassified research in the world. Put into user service December 2009.
- Carver, an IBM iDataPlex system, named for George Washington Carver, with 9,984 compute cores and a theoretical peak performance of 106.5 Teraflops/sec, 33 TB of memory. Put into user service Mar 2010.
- PDSF, a 352-processor Linux cluster with 135 TB of online storage used by the high energy physics community for data intensive analysis and simulations. PDSF has been in production longer than any other Linux cluster in the world, undergoing several hardware upgrades sinces it went online in 1998.
- HPSS Archival storage, in use since 1998. The NERSC IBM HPSS system archives more than 40 petabytes (PB)(1 petabyte = 1000 terabytes = 1 million gigabytes = 1000 million megabytes (MB)) of data. The system has a 240 PB capacity using current tape technology.
- High speed network. NERSC connects to the internet with two 10 gigabit/sec links. A first of its kind research connection to other DOE labs operates at 100 gigabits/sec.
Some retired systems that use to be behind these walls:
- Franklin, a Cray XT4 with 38,128 Opteron compute cores has a peak performance of 352 TFlops/sec, 78 terabytes (TB) of aggregate memory and 436 TB of storage. Put into user service September 2007, retired April 2012.
The original cache owner proudly worked here until his retirement in 2012, but one of his minions has taken over the cache ownership and is proudly maintaining it.