The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, announced plans to build its groundbreaking supercomputer, Doudna, which is expected to be operational in 2026. Dell will be responsible for the construction and will use NVIDIA's next-generation computing platform.Vera Rubin.
The "Doudna," also known as "NERSC-10," is named after Nobel laureate and CRISPR gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna. This new generation system is designed not only for computing speed but also for impact.
At the same time, "Doudna" is tailored for the immediate exploration needs of the U.S. Department of Energy's most pressing scientific missions. This new-generation system will enable American researchers to be at the forefront of key scientific breakthroughs, promote innovation and consolidate the United States' competitive advantage in key technology fields.
Doudna's scientific achievements are expected to bePrevious generation system "Perlmutter"It is more than 10 times higher, while using only 2 to 3 times the energy of "Perlmutter", which means that the performance per watt will be improved by 3 to 5 times. This is due to technological innovations in chip design, dynamic load balancing and system-level efficiency.
Doudna is not just a standalone system; it's an integral part of the scientific workflow. The U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) will transmit data from telescopes, detectors, and genome sequencers to Doudna in real time via the low-latency, high-throughput NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand network.
Doudna not only supports traditional high-performance computing (HPC), cutting-edge artificial intelligence computing, and real-time streaming, but also corresponds to workflows including quantum computing. It combines the high-performance CPU and memory-coherent GPU of the Vera Rubin computing platform, allowing all processors to directly access and share data to support the most demanding scientific workloads.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said: "Doudna will advance scientific discoveries from chemistry and physics to biology, all powered by the power unleashed by artificial intelligence."
“I’m incredibly proud of America’s continued investment in this area,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “It’s the foundation of American scientific discovery and the cornerstone of our continued economic and technological leadership.”
“I’m incredibly honored to be here,” said Jennifer Doudna. “I think we’re at a very interesting moment in biology, where people with diverse skills are coming together to tackle global problems.” Doudna added that she was “surprised and delighted” that a supercomputer would be named after her.
“The Doudna supercomputer is designed to accelerate a wide range of scientific workflows,” said Sudip Dosanjh, director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). “Doudna will be connected to the U.S. Department of Energy’s experiments and observatories through the Energy Science Network, enabling scientists to seamlessly stream data from across the country into the system and perform near-instant analysis.”
Doudna provides nearly instant response capabilities and integrated workflows to more than 11000 researchers, helping scientists explore bigger questions and find answers faster than ever before.
“We’re not just building a faster computer, we’re building a system that helps researchers think more broadly and solve problems faster,” said Nick Wright, head of the Advanced Technology Division at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and chief architect of Doudna.
Nick Wright expects Doudna to drive progress in the following areas:
• Nuclear fusion: Achieve breakthroughs in simulation technology to achieve clean nuclear fusion energy.
• Materials Science: AI models for designing new superconducting materials.
• Accelerate drug discovery: Ultra-high-speed workflows can help biologists fold proteins quickly and deploy them ahead of epidemics.
• Astronomy: Real-time processing of data from the Dark Energy Spectrometer at Kitt Peak National Observatory in the United States is helping scientists map the universe at unprecedented speed.
