A sampling of more than 70 years of Berkeley Lab’s storied history in computer science, computational science, data science, and mathematics is captured in this timeline, a legacy that predates the Department of Energy’s inception.
To view a larger version of the timeline, open in full-screen mode.
Although officially formed in 1986, ESnet’s roots stretch back to the mid-1970s, when staff at the CTR Computer Center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory installed four acoustic modems on a borrowed Control Data Corp. 6600 computer.
Since those days, the network now known as ESnet has marked many milestones and is today one of the world’s premier networks supporting scientific research around the globe.
Launched in 1974 as a computing resource for fusion energy research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NERSC quickly expanded its role to include users from all SC program offices. In 1996, the center moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Today, its almost 10,000 users make NERSC one of the most scientifically productive high performance computing (HPC) centers in the world: NERSC users produce an average of 2,500 referred publications annually. In addition, over the years, the center has been associated with seven Nobel Prize-winning scientists or their teams.
