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

OURSYSTEMS DOCUMENTATIONFOR USERS CENTERSTATUS APPLY TOUSE NERSC

Now Playing

Some Scientific Computing Now in Progress at NERSC

Project	System	Nodes
Development of Active-Learning Methods and High Throughput Simulation Datasets for Catalysis Basic Energy Sciences PI: John Kitchin, Carnegie Mellon University	perlmutter	120
First-Principles Catalyst Design for Environmentally Benign Energy Production Basic Energy Sciences PI: Manos Mavrikakis, University of Wisconsin - Madison	perlmutter	100
High-Latitude Application and Testing (HiLAT) of Earth System Models & Regional Arctic System Model Biological & Environmental Research PI: Hailong Wang, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)	perlmutter	73
Huge Ensembles of Weather Extremes using the Fourier Forecasting Neural Network ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge PI: William Collins, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory	perlmutter	64
Water Cycle and Climate Extremes Modeling (WACCEM) Biological & Environmental Research PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)	perlmutter	58
Large scale simulations of materials for quantum information science ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge PI: Giulia Galli, University of Chicago	perlmutter	48

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.)