| ALCC | ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge |
| ASCR | Advanced Scientific Computing Research (office of) |
| ASIC | Application-Specific Integrated Circuit |
| CFS | Community File System |
| CPU | Central Processing Unit |
| CRT | Computational Research and Theory Facility (aka Wang Hall) map |
| DDR | Double Data Rate |
| DTN | Data Transfer Node |
| DVS | Data Virtualization Service |
| ERCAP | Energy Research Computer Allocations Program |
| JGI | Joint Genome Institute |
| GPFS | (IBM's) General Purpose File System |
| GPU | Graphical Processing Unit |
| HPC | High Performance Computing |
| HPSS | High Performance Storage System |
| HT (also HTT) | Hyperthreading |
| IO (also I/O) | Input Output |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| KNL | Knights Landing |
| LDAP | Lightweight Directory Access Protocol |
| MCDRAM | Multi-Channel DRAM |
| MFA | Multi-Factor Authentication |
| MKL | (Intel) Math Kernel Library |
| MOTD | Message of the Day |
| MOM | Machine Oriented Mini-server |
| MPI | Message Passing Interface |
| MPMD | Multiple Programs, Multiple Data |
| MPP | Massively Parallel Processor |
| MTBF | Mean Time Between Failures |
| NERSC | National Energy Research Scientific Computing |
| NGF | NERSC Global File system |
| NUG | NERSC User Group |
| NUMA | Non-Uniform Memory Access |
| OS | Operating System |
| OTP | One-time Password |
| PGI | Portland Group Incorporated |
| PI | Principal Investigator |
| QDR | Quad Data Rate |
| QOS | Quality of Service |
| SIMD | Single Instruction, Multiple Data |
| SIMT | Single Instruction, Multiple Threads |
| SPMD | Single Program, Multiple Data |
| SSH | Secure Shell |
| UPC | Unified Parallel C (programming language) |