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

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Computing at NERSC

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Now Playing

A snapshot of scientific computing now happening at NERSC

Project	System	Nodes
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.)