Overview

• The Department of Energy awarded a contract to Dell Technologies and NVIDIA to develop the Doudna system at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s NERSC facility.
• Named for Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, the machine will leverage NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin GPUs and CPUs alongside Dell’s liquid-cooling infrastructure.
• Doudna’s performance is projected to exceed the current Perlmutter system’s scientific output by more than tenfold while increasing power usage by less than a factor of three.
• The system will connect to the Energy Sciences Network to stream data from DOE experimental and observational facilities for near-real-time analysis.
• It is designed to support research in fusion energy, materials science, astronomy and drug discovery and will open to users in 2027 after completing construction by the end of 2026.