NERSC Acronym List

NERSC has a unique set of terminology all its own; below are some of the acronyms used here.

ACTS

The Advanced Computational Testing and Simulation project is building a set of software tools for high performance computing. This set of tools is known as the ACTS Toolkit.

ASCR

Advanced Scientific Computing Research. One of the five DOE Offices of Science. See the ASCR web pages

BER

Biological and Environmental Research. One of the five DOE Offices of Science. See the BER web pages

BES

Basic Energy Sciences. One of the five DOE Offices of Science. See the BES web pages

CUB

Centralized User Bank. Obsolete system by which computer time allocations were managed at NERSC prior to FY 2001. No longer available on NERSC systems. Replaced by NIM.

ERCAP

Energy Research Computing Allocations Process. The procedure Principal Investigators go through to obtain access to NERSC facilities and services. See the NERSC Allocations web page.

ERSUG

Energy Research Supercomputer Users Group. Now the NUG (NERSC User's Group) See the NUG web page.

FES

Fusion Energy Sciences. One of the five DOE Offices of Science. See the FES web pages

HENP

High Energy and Nuclear Physics. One of the five DOE Offices of Science. See the HENP web pages

HSI

HPSS Interface Utility, an interface to NERSC's archival storage system. See the HSI web page.

HPSS

High Performance Storage System. HPSS is NERSC's archival storage system. See HPSS web page.

LBL, LBNL

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where NERSC is located. LBNL is in Berkeley, CA, on the hillside above the University of California at Berkeley.

IBM SP is an MPP machine.

NERSC

National Energy Research Scientific Computing center. A national center which supports scientific computing for the the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science (formerly Office of Energy Research). See www.nersc.gov for all NERSC activities.

NIM

NERSC Information Management. Starting in FY 2001 NIM is the NERSC account management system.

NUG

Energy Research Supercomputer Users Group. Previously ERSUG (NERSC User's Group) See the NUG web page.

PDSF

Parallel Distributed Systems Facility. The PDSF is a networked distributed computing environment used to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of large scale High Energy Physics (HEP) and Nuclear Science (NS) investigations.

PE

A Processing Element on the Cray T3E. A PE is a single processor in this distributed memory computer. NERSC's T3E, retired in 2001, had 644 PEs that can be used for scientific computation.

PI

Each NERSC repository has a single Principal Investigator, or PI for short. The PI is the scientific head of the project supported by an allocation of NERSC resources. Although the PI may delegate some responsibilities to account managers, he or she is ultimately responsible for procuring and managing the repository.

repo

Allocations of NERSC resources are made to repositories (repos for short), which are group accounts. In general, a repo has many users, (each with an individual user account) working on a common scientific project, lead by a single PI. Any charges incurred by a user must be drawn from the account belonging to some repo. See the Accounts web page.

setcub

setcub is the obsolete user interface for the Centralized User Bank (CUB) system by which computer time allocations were managed at NERSC prior to FY2001. It is no longer available on NERSC systems, and has been replaced by NIM.

SciDAC

The DOE's Office of Science's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program. A number of SciDAC projects use NERSC facilities.

SRU

Allocations of storage resources in HPSS are given in Storage Resource Units, or SRUs. See the NERSC HPSS Charging web page for more information.

USG

You may see references to USG, or NERSC's User Services Group. The staff members in USG are the contacts to the NERSC user community.