BERKELEY, CA, May 29, 2025 — During a visit to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today announced a new contract with Dell Technologies to develop NERSC-10, which the agency called the next flagship supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) user facility at Berkeley Lab in California.
The Trump Administration said the system will be one of the most advanced supercomputers ever deployed by the department, “advancing U.S. leadership in the global race for AI.”
In a blog post, NVIDIA said Doudna is expected to outperform its predecessor, Perlmutter, by more than 10x in scientific output while using 2-3x the power, translating into a 3-5x increase in performance per watt, a result of chip design, dynamic load balancing and system-level efficiencies. Perlmutter, unveiled in 2021, is a 6,000 NVIDIA GPU-powered (with AMD CPUs), 4-exaFLOPS AI supercomputer from HPE-Cray.
The Doudna system will merge simulation, data and AI into a single platform.
“The Doudna supercomputer is designed to accelerate a broad set of scientific workflows,” said NERSC Director Sudip Dosanjh. “Doudna will be connected to DOE experimental and observational facilities through the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), allowing scientists to stream data seamlessly into the system from all parts of the country and to analyze it in near real time.”
It’s engineered to empower over 11,000 researchers with near-time responsiveness and integrated workflows. “We’re not just building a faster computer,” said Nick Wright, advanced technologies group lead and Doudna chief architect at NERSC. “We’re building a system that helps researchers think bigger and discover sooner.”
The new system, due in 2026, will be named after Jennifer Doudna, the Berkeley Lab-based biochemist who won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of her work on the gene-editing technology CRISPR.
The supercomputer, to be powered by NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform, 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—and provide an environment for science discovery.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright
“The Doudna system represents DOE’s commitment to advancing American leadership in science, AI, and high-performance computing,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “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. 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.”
“At Dell Technologies, we are empowering researchers worldwide by seamlessly integrating simulation, data, and AI to address the world’s most complex challenges,” said Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies. “Our collaboration with the Department of Energy on Doudna underscores a shared vision to redefine the limits of high-performance computing and drive innovation that accelerates human progress.”
“Doudna is a time machine for science — compressing years of discovery into days,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “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.”
“The Doudna supercomputer is designed to accelerate a broad set of scientific workflows. We are collaborating with NVIDIA and Dell to prepare our 11,000 users to effectively use this system’s exciting new workflow capabilities,” said NERSC Director Sudip Dosanjh. “Doudna will be connected to DOE experimental and observational facilities through the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), allowing scientists to stream data seamlessly into the system from all parts of the country and to analyze it in near-real time.”
