Berkeley Lab Receives Early Access System for Doudna Supercomputer

The road to deploying the next flagship supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center reached an important milestone with the delivery of the NERSC-10 Pilot Early Access System.

Smaller than the full-size system the EAS gives NERSC staff and vendor Dell Technologies the opportunity to refine assembly delivery installation and integration processes paving the way for seamless deployment of the full-scale production system in late 2026.

We are excited to take delivery of the early access system said NERSC Director Sudip Dosanjh. This is an important step in deploying Doudna for NERSCs 11000-plus users. We plan to use the EAS to develop and test the software stack for Doudna in collaboration with Dell Technologies NVIDIA and our other partners.

The next NERSC supercomputer will be called Doudna after Jennifer Doudna the biochemist honored with a Nobel Prize for her work on CRISPR gene-editing technology. The EAS will be called Cech in honor of Thomas Cech the chemist awarded a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cechs work was a crucial stepping stone to Doudnas research.

NERSC is where the future of science becomes real said Paul Perez Senior Fellow at Dell Technologies Federal. The early access system is the first step toward Doudna which will set the blueprint for how federal agencies scale HPC and AI securely efficiently and at mission speed.