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.
- MPP
-
Massively Parallel Processor. Generally denotes a
distributed memory computer with more than a "few" independent
processors or nodes. At NERSC
the IBM SP is an
MPP machines.
- 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; see hpcf.nersc.gov for its
High Performance Computing Facility.
- 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 SRU 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.