NERSC Facility Upgrade and NERSC-10 Installation & Operation

The University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory proposes to upgrade Building 59 (also known as Shyh Wang Hall) electrical and cooling systems and install and operate a new high-performance computing (HPC) system identified as NERSC-10 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, or Berkeley Lab). The purpose of the building upgrade ("NERSC Facility Upgrade 2" or NFU2) is to accommodate NERSC-10 and potential future generations of high-performance computing system(s) while reducing reliance upon potable water for facility cooling. The purpose of new generations of high-performance computing systems like NERSC-10 is to meet the continually evolving needs of the NERSC user community and to further advance NERSC's mission of accelerating scientific discovery. 

In this new era of high-performance computing (HPC), along with the convergence of simulations and modeling, advances in artificial intelligence (AI), and an explosion of experimental and observational data, there is a critical need to integrate these capabilities to enable new modes of scientific discovery.   

Funded by the DOE SC's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), NERSC is the mission HPC facility for the Office of Science, uniquely supporting the needs of science across the entire office. ASCR's mission is to discover, develop, and deploy computational and networking capabilities to analyze, model, simulate, and predict complex phenomena important to the DOE. 

The NERSC community is currently experiencing a transition with the emergence of energy-efficient GPUs, specialty processors, and other components. At the same time, new software technologies are emerging, inspired in part by the needs of data-driven workflows that couple HPC and experimental facilities in real-time. These technology changes, along with new science, use cases requiring more flexible, programmable, and resilient HPC systems, present new opportunities for mapping computational tasks and workflow components to hardware that might be more efficient and faster for a given problem. 

The NERSC-10 system is intended to leverage these new technologies and support the emerging needs in AI and experimental and observational science by accelerating end-to-end DOE SC workflows and enabling new modes of scientific discovery through the integration of experiment, data analysis, and simulation. 

To accommodate the upgrades, outdoor electric power and cooling equipment would be installed on a new pad and a new platform adjacent to Building 59. A screening wall would provide visual and acoustical baffling around the cooling equipment. The project would change neither the building's structure nor its occupancy. Construction is expected to commence in late-2024 with work continuing through 2026. CEQA, NEPA, and project documentation are included below.