NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

NERSC Turns 50 in 2024

Did you know NERSC got its start in fusion energy research? Learn more about our unique history and celebrate half a century of energizing scientific enlightenment through computing. » Read More

Shining a Light on Microbial Dark Matter

NERSC collaborations help illuminate Earth’s biodiversity. » Read More

Perlmutter Supports Gravitational Lensing System Modeled on GPUs

A team of researchers has modeled a rare instance of strong gravitational lensing known as an Einstein Cross. It’s likely the first such model run on GPUs. » Read More

NERSC Helps Scientists Build Public Health Datasets from Location Services

Research focuses on human interaction patterns to understand drivers of the COVID-19 spread and mitigation » Read More

‘Intro to HPC’ Bootcamp Focuses on Energy Justice

DOE'S broad-based program emphasizes social issues to attract a diverse pool of students to computing sciences » Read More

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

Computing at NERSC

Now Playing

A snapshot of scientific computing now happening at NERSC

Project System Nodes Node Hours Used
The Structure of Light Nuclei from Lattice QCD
 Nuclear Physics
 PI: William Detmold, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
perlmutter 256
Relativistic quantum dynamics in the non-equilibrium regime
 Basic Energy Sciences
 PI: Albert De Prince, Florida State University
perlmutter 128
Lattice QCD search for physics beyond the standard model
 High Energy Physics
 PI: Rajan Gupta, Los Alamos National Laboratory
perlmutter 128
Lattice QCD Monte Carlo Calculation of Hadronic Structure and Spectroscopy
 Nuclear Physics
 PI: Keh-Fei Liu, University of Kentucky
perlmutter 128
High temperature electronic structure theory using density matrix quantum Monte Carlo
 Basic Energy Sciences
 PI: James Shepherd, University of Iowa
perlmutter 120
Tokamak Disruption Simulation
 Fusion Energy Sciences
 PI: Xianzhu Tang, Los Alamos National Laboratory
perlmutter 120

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.)