Legacy of the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center

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During the 1990s, NERSC grew through many powerful machines and continued to develop and create many parallel computing networks.  Today, NERSC has grown from that borrowed CDC 6600 machine at the CTR, performing at less than one million calculations per second, to a facility that supports many varied disciplines and research areas and will soon deliver a Cray XT-4 that performs at 100 trillion calculations per second.

Another contribution derived from the MFECC comes from its MFEnet network design of the mid-1980s, ESnet (Energy Sciences Network), a pioneer in providing high-bandwidth, ultra-reliable network connections to its users.  The first segment of a new, nationwide network recently went live, marking a key step in significantly upgrading networking services to thousands of scientific researchers across the country and around the world.

The first complete national ring of the new network, dubbed ESnet4, will be introduced segment by segment from the east coast to the west coast, and is slated to be completely operational by September 2007.  The new network will begin by operating on two dedicated 10 gigabit per second wavelengths on the new Internet2 nationwide optical infrastructure, allowing Department of Energy researchers to share enormous amounts of data and to remotely operate scientific experiments.

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