50th Anniversary Seminar Series Kicks Off

Join us for a series of seminars celebrating NERSC's legacy and future in scientific supercomputing. » Read More

Boosting Carbon-Negative Building Materials

Locking greenhouse gases into building materials could store them safely for many years. Researchers using NERSC resources are advancing the science behind this idea. » Read More

NERSC Featured at APS

Watch a new video exploring NERSC's mission and impact. It was featured at the American Physical Society's annual meeting. » Read More

Getting a Peek Into Ice Giants

Scientists are using NERSC's Perlmutter supercomputer to study the interior chemistry of ice giant planets like our solar system's Neptune. » Read More

50 Years of NERSC Firsts

Get the highlights from our last half-century of scientific supercomputing. » Read More

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

NERSC is the mission scientific computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the nation’s single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.

Computing at NERSC

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Now Playing

Some Scientific Computing Now in Progress at NERSC

Project	System	Nodes
Energy Exascale Earth System Modeling (E3SM) Biological & Environmental Research PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)	perlmutter	512
Machine learning the metastable phase diagram of materials from quantum calculations Basic Energy Sciences PI: Subramanian Sankaranarayanan, Argonne National Laboratory	perlmutter	100
Water Cycle and Climate Extremes Modeling (WACCEM) Biological & Environmental Research PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)	perlmutter	58
Toward exascale computing of electron-phonon couplings for finite-temperature materials design Basic Energy Sciences PI: Feliciano Giustino, University of Texas at Austin	perlmutter	40
Multiscale coupled fluid-kinetic models of plasmas Fusion Energy Sciences PI: Giovanni Lapenta, Space Science Institute	perlmutter	35
Lattice QCD search for physics beyond the standard model High Energy Physics PI: Rajan Gupta, Los Alamos National Laboratory	perlmutter	32

Did You Know?

Lucky Tokens

Man and woman show lucky cat figurine while standing in front of open computer system cabinet.

Yukiko Sekine, Jonathan Carter, and the Hopper system's “lucky cat,” in 2011. (Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab)

NERSC’s Hopper supercomputer contained 153,216 compute cores, 217 terabytes of memory, 2 petabytes of disk storage—and a cat figurine for luck!

Hopper, named in honor of computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper, had a Japanese "lucky cat" figurine stashed in one cabinet. In April 2011, Yukiko Sekine (NERSC's former Energy Department program manager) presented the cat to Jonathan Carter (currently associate lab director for the Computing Sciences Area).

It’s not the first lucky token to stand guard over NERSC’s large, complex, and well-used scientific supercomputers. Other systems – for reasons known only to NERSC staff – have been protected from ill fate by rubber chickens. (»Visit our interactive timeline to learn more about NERSC history.)