FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 22, 1996NEWS MEDIA CONTACT:
Chris Kielich/Janet Severn, 202/586-5806
POWERFUL UNCLASSIFIED COMPUTER NETWORK TO SPEED RESEARCH FOR THOUSANDS
National Computing Center Dedicated
A powerful new computer system will bring together thousands of scientists across the country to tackle national challenges-such as cleaner burning engines and furnaces and cleanup of radioactive and toxic waste-through computer simulations and testing. The new National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBNL) in California was dedicated today by Deputy Secretary of Energy Charles B. Curtis.The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) combined with the Energy Sciences network (ESnet), DOE's high performance Internet backbone, are the nation's most powerful unclassified-only computing and network resources. NERSC's facilities include a suite of the latest Cray/SGI high-performance computers, superior visualization tools, and massive data storage systems that could easily swallow the Library of Congress's extensive collection several times over. Today NERSC can calculate 110 billion calculations every second. By March 1997 that capability is expected to more than triple.
"Supercomputers like NERSC will provide the technology necessary to perform 'virtual' laboratory experiments," said Secretary of Energy Hazel R. O'Leary. "The ability to share information and solve complex scientific problems will enable researchers to find the tools to combat diseases like cancer and deal with problems like environmental contamination. NERSC will play a substantial role in President Clinton's initiative to connect educational institutions and libraries to the Internet."
Founded in 1973, NERSC is the most powerful combination of unclassified networking and computing resources in the U.S. and one of the largest unclassified scientific computing resources in the world. A DOE facility that provides computing for thousands of DOE funded researchers at over 150 sites, NERSC is the principal provider of large-scale computing services to DOE's energy research programs. Scientific programs around the world will now benefit from NERSC high-performance computing through collaborations with DOE national laboratories, universities, and industry.
The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), managed by the Computing Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, provides high-speed access to existing supercomputing facilities and over 30 international sites. NERSC is part of a large computing sciences effort at Berkeley Lab which includes computer science research, collaborations with faculty research programs at U.C. Berkeley, world-class applied mathematics, the Center for Computational Science and Engineering, and an array of computational research programs in the physical sciences. Any site connected to the global Internet should be accessible to ESnet.
DOE recently announced the purchase of two three-trillion-operations-per-second supercomputers for national security missions. These computers will conduct both classified and unclassified operations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The NERSC Home Page can be viewed at http://www.nersc.gov
- DOE -
R-96-159
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