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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 Computing

Some of the science now being computed at NERSC

Numbers not changing? Check the center status page for information.

Project	System	Nodes
Lattice QCD search for physics beyond the standard model High Energy Physics PI: Rajan Gupta, Los Alamos National Laboratory	perlmutter	128
Instabilities in relativisic plasmas Fusion Energy Sciences PI: Thomas Kluge, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf	perlmutter	128
Quarkonia in Hot Medium Nuclear Physics PI: Peter Petreczky, Brookhaven National Lab	perlmutter	128
Turbulent Transport and Multiscale Gyrokinetic Simulation Fusion Energy Sciences PI: Weixing Wang, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL)	perlmutter	64
The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon High Energy Physics PI: Aida El-Khadra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	perlmutter	48
Energy Exascale Earth System Modeling (E3SM) Biological & Environmental Research PI: Lai-Yung Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)	perlmutter	42

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.)