Located at Berkeley Lab since May 1996, NERSC is home to five other CRAY supercomputers and now has a combined computational capacity of 500 gigaflops (a gigaflop is one billion calculations per second).

"Since NERSC was moved to Berkeley Lab last year, our goal has been to provide the highest performance computing capability to our users in order to enable scientific discovery," says NERSC Director Horst Simon. "As we make the T3E available to our users across the country, they're finding that the machine allows them to push the boundaries of scientific computing as they know it. At the same time, NERSC is continuing to help define the future shape of scientific computing."

Although having powerful machines is an important part of NERSC, Simon emphasizes that the center is also committed to providing scientists with the necessary tools, from training to the latest algorithms, to enable them to achieve breakthrough computational science.

Early users of Berkeley Lab's CRAY T3E are seven teams of scientists at various national laboratories and universities tackling "grand challenges" ranging from treating nuclear waste to understanding the human genome, from understanding quarks and gluons and other exotic forms of matter formed in the wake of the "Big Bang" to creating the next generation of particle accelerators.

The new computer is an enhanced configuration of the CRAY T3E delivered to Berkeley Lab last Fall. Since its delivery, that machine has been subject to rigorous testing by the NERSC staff and cooperative improvement efforts by both Cray and the Center.

"We have always been excited to be part of the groundbreaking research that these scientists are conducting," said Robert "Bo" Ewald, vice president of Silicon Graphics, Inc. and president of Cray Research, its supercomputing subsidiary. "Now, with this new CRAY T3E-900 supercomputer, NERSC will provide its users with a powerful production supercomputing environment that gives them an entirely new level of insight into their research challenges."

Once fully configured, the CRAY T3E-900 supercomputer will offer 1.5 terabytes of disc storage, a read/write capability of 800 megabytes per second and 128 gigabytes of memory.

NERSC, established in 1974, provides high performance and computing and networking services to DOE's Energy Research programs at national laboratories, universities and industry.

For more information about NERSC visit our website at www.nersc.gov