US supercomputer named after Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna to power AI and scientific research

A new supercomputer named after a winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry will help power artificial intelligence technology and scientific discoveries from a perch in the hills above the University of California, Berkeley, federal officials said Thursday.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced the project Thursday alongside executives from computer maker Dell Technologies and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

The new computing system at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will be called Doudna after Berkeley professor and biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who won a Nobel in 2020 for her work on the gene-editing technology CRISPR. It’s due to switch on next year.

“One of the key use cases will be genomics research,” said Dion Harris, a product executive in Nvidia’s AI and high-performance computing division, in an interview. “It was basically just a nod to her contributions to the field.”

Dell is contracted with the energy department to build the computer, the latest to be housed at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. Previous computers there have been named after other Nobel winners: Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist, and Gerty Cori, a biochemist.

It’s not clear yet how the computer will rank on the TOP500 listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The current top-ranked computer is El Capitan, located about an hour’s drive away at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. That’s followed by other supercomputers at U.S. national labs in Tennessee and Illinois.

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