In order to facilitate compute intensive research at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and its collaborating institutions, NICS has deployed a supercomputer named Darter. Darter is named after a freshwater indigenous fish native to East Tennessee.

Darter is a Cray XC30 system with an Aries interconnect and a Lustre storage system, that provide both high scalability and sustained performance. The Darter supercomputer has a peak performance of 240.9 Tflops (10¹² floating point operations per second).