The United States Department of Energy has engaged Dell Technologies to develop NERSC-10, touted as the next flagship supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
NERSC is a US DOE user facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) in California.
The new system, due in 2026, will be named after Jennifer Doudna. She was the Berkeley Lab-based biochemist who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This was in recognition of her work on the gene-editing technology CRISPR.
The new supercomputer is a Dell Technologies system powered by Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform. It will be engineered to support large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) workloads like those in molecular dynamics, high-energy physics. and AI training and inference. It will also provide a robust environment for the workflows that make cutting-edge science possible.
The DOE said Doudna will be one of the most advanced supercomputers ever deployed by the Department.
“It will be a powerhouse for rapid innovation that will transform our efforts to develop abundant, affordable energy supplies and advance breakthroughs in quantum computing,” said US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.
“AI is the Manhattan Project of our time, and Doudna will help ensure America’s scientists have the tools they need to win the global race for AI dominance,” said Wright.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, describes Doudna as a time machine for science, which compresses “years of discovery into days.”
“Built together with DOE and powered by Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform, it will let scientists delve deeper and think bigger to seek the fundamental truths of the universe,” said Huang.
