Special Resources at LBNL

NERSC at LBNL is one of the largest open and unclassified computing facilities for basic science in the country. Operating the NERSC Center has enabled LBNL to acquire unsurpassed expertise in providing comprehensive scientific support that enables researchers to make the most productive use of these resources. NERSC supports more than 2,900 users nationally and internationally. Over 50% of the users are from universities. NERSC is known worldwide for the quality of its computing services, and its success is measured by the scientific productivity of its users. For selected CSE projects it will be possible to access the following resources.

• Franklin, a Cray XT4 supercomputer, composed of AMD dual core processors running at 2.6 GHz, will have 19,344 compute CPUs, each with 2 GB (gigabytes) of memory per CPU (over 38.6 TB (trillion bytes) altogether), and a peak performance of 101.5 Teraflop/s (trillion calculations per second). The system will have a bisection bandwidth of 6.3 TB/s and 402 TB of usable disk.

• PDSF, a 764-processor Linux cluster with over 300 TB of disk 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 since it went online in 1998.

• HPSS mass storage. The NERSC HPSS system archives 1.5 petabytes (PB) of data in 45 million files, and will have a capacity of 16 PB by the end of 2005. HPSS sustains an average transfer rate of more than 100 MB/s, 24 hours per day, with peaks to 450 MB/s, to and from NERSC computational systems and to and from sources outside NERSC, such as scientific experiments.