Scientists at universities and national laboratories across the country are now tapping into the power of the world's largest supercomputer dedicated to unclassified research and have reported important breakthroughs in climate research, materials science and astrophysics.

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has opened its newest supercomputer - a 3,328-processor IBM RS/6000 SP system - to more than 2,000 researchers at national laboratories and universities across the country. The IBM SP, named "Seaborg" in honor of Berkeley Lab Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg, is capable of performing five trillion calculations per second (5 teraflop/s).

"Until now, this level of computing power simply has not been available to support research across a broad range of computational science," said Berkeley Lab Director Charles Shank. "As of today, however, scientists who are researching global climate change, exploring how to cut pollution from internal combustion engines, designing power sources for the future and finding new ways to treat disease have a much more powerful tool at their disposal. We fully expect this research to help shape how we live in the future."

The supercomputer is located in Berkeley Lab's new Oakland Scientific Facility in downtown Oakland. The new IBM SP boasts the computing power of more than one million desktop PCs, all able to work together to tackle some of the world's toughest scientific problems.

After thorough testing to ensure it met the rigorous demands of 24-by-7 operation, NERSC's IBM SP was opened to DOE's research community in late August. Soon afterward, scientists around the country began using its power to make important gains in studying complex problems.

"Serving up a lot of computing horsepower is only part of the computational science equation," said Horst Simon, director of the NERSC Division at Berkeley Lab. "The real measure of our success as a supercomputing center is the level of science our research community is able to achieve using our resources. We're very excited by the results already being reported and are looking forward to even greater accomplishments."

Early users of the IBM supercomputer have already reported important scientific results in astrophysics, climate research and materials science. Teams have been working on projects such as the Nature of the Universe, High Resolution Global Climate Modeling and Better Understanding of Magnetic Forces.

NERSC is the DOE's flagship center for unclassified computing. For information about NERSC, visit . Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. The Laboratory conducts only unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Visit the Lab's Web site at www.lbl.gov .