Edison Installation Begins (Photo: Roy Kaltschmidt)

Phase 1 of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)’s newest supercomputer, named Edison, has made its way to Berkeley Lab. The architecture is a Cray XC30 (“Cascade”) and will be installed in two phases. When it’s fully installed in 2013, Edison will have a peak performance of more than 2 petaflops (a petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second).

The integrated storage system will have more than 6 petabytes of storage with an I/O bandwidth of 140 gigabytes per second. The system is named after U.S. inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison. NERSC serves more than 4,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in combustion, climate modeling, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines.