ERCAP 2026 Guidance

Sizing your ERCAP request

Allocations of compute time for allocation year (AY) 2026 are based on units of “node hours.” Your request for AY 2026 must be appropriately sized based on these units. The section on calculating charges in the Queues and Charges page provides an overview of the job charging policy, and the job cost calculator tool can be used to estimate the costs of the types of jobs your project will run.

Available resources for 2026

DOE Mission Science proposals are evaluated by the Office of Science program you select in your proposal. Each of these programs has a pool of time to distribute and your allocation is drawn from these pools. The ERCAP form will provide an alert if more than 10% of the program’s allocation pool is requested.

When requesting GPU Node hours on Perlmutter, you must provide justification of your code’s readiness for running on GPUs. Please see the documentation on GPU readiness for more information.

Accessing the ERCAP form

The ERCAP form is available at https://ercap.nersc.gov. For information on creating a new or renewal application and tips for each section of the form, please see the documentation on Making an Allocation Request.

PIs without an active NERSC account

If you are a PI who has never used NERSC, apply for a new PI account via the New PI Account Request Form.

If you were formerly a NERSC user but your account has expired, please contact us at accounts@nersc.gov to revive your old account.

Authorized preparers

PIs can add authorized preparers to their ERCAP request, to allow others to help prepare the request.