Oil crisis stalled cars, but jumpstarted a supercomputing revolution

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By then, 1,000 researchers were using the center.  In 1979 it moved to a new building which housed four major computers and network equipment valued at $25 million.

The MFECC continued expanding in the 1980s.  Trivelpiece was named director of the DOE Office of Energy Research and again had a hand in defining the department’s computing resources.

The center’s major players — Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge national laboratories, General Atomics and the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab — used 64% of the resources, with the remainder going to other labs.

After surveying a number of disciplines, Trivelpiece decided the MFECC should include researchers in other fields.

Trivelpiece also recommended that MFEnet be combined with a similar network (HEPnet) supporting high-energy physics research.  The new Energy Sciences Network, or ESnet, was to create a single general-purpose scientific network for the energy research community.  Staffers at the NMFECC were responsible for operating the new network.  (Communications speeds, only 56 kilobits per second in the late 1980s when ESnet came into being, now exceed 600 megabits per second, or over 10,000 times faster.)

By the middle of the decade, nearly 3,500 users were taking advantage of NMFECC resources.  The center added a Cray X-MP as well as the first Cray-2 supercomputer.  The four-processor Cray-2, along with the two-processor X-MP, allowed for multiprocessing of codes, resulting in far higher available computing speed. The X-MP had a theoretical peak speed of 400 million calculations per second (400 megaflops); the Cray-2, with a theoretical peak speed of nearly 2 billion calculations per second (2 gigaflops), was twelve times as fast as the Cray-1 acquired in 1978.

As the 1980s ended, nearly a third of the NMFECC computing resources were supporting DOE programs other than fusion research.  The allocations included:

• 15 percent for basic energy sciences,
• 14 percent for health and environment,
• 12 percent for high energy and nuclear physics, and
• 2.5 percent for applied math.

With the dawn of a new decade, the NMFECC’s name was changed to the National Energy Research Supercomputer Center (NERSC) to reflect its broader mission.  (See the story here.) What had its roots in weapons code, fusion research and boxes of switches cobbled together to produce computing power at what now seem like excruciatingly slow speeds became a world-class supercomputing effort.

Today, NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provides high-performance computing resources for more than 2,500 researchers at national laboratories, universities, and industry.  The most powerful of these is still being installed – a 100-teraflop Cray XT-4.

Many individuals lent their knowledge and insight into the management, both technical and administrative, of these computing machines, enabling their growth from a peak performance of 1 million calculations per second in 1974 to today’s machines that can run at performance times of at least 100 trillion calculations per second.

“It was a privilege to have had the opportunity to help this effort along at a critical time, but there are many gifted people who really made it all work.  They are the ones that deserve the most credit,” Trivelpiece says.

The bottom line for many, he adds, was “to create conditions that allow science to get done.”

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