Sometimes research worthy of the Nobel prize requires NERSC.

NERSC? — National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. It’s home to extremely powerful, extremely fast and extremely accurate computing and just turned 40. They celebrated the anniversary with a look at the research behind four Nobel Prizes:

George Smoot, UC Berkeley – 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics
Cosmic microwave background radiation

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley – 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics
The expanding universe

Martin Karplus, Harvard – 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The courses of chemical reactions

Warren Washington, National Center for Atmospheric Research – 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change; Man-made climate change

What does it take to be called a supercomputer? Edison, the newest computer at NERSC, boasts 322 terabytes of memory, 124,608 processing cores, 462 terabytes per second of global memory bandwidth, 11 terabytes per second bisection bandwidth, and 7.56 petabytes of disk storage. That’s a lot of computer!

Watch A Perspective on Biology featuring John Kuriyan from Martin Karplus’ team as he describes the research that led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.