A new supercomputer intended to feed artificial intelligence will soon be built for the National Laboratory of Lawrence Berkeley in partnership with the Ministry of Energy, Dell Technologies and Nvidia.
“We are going to make a giant step in several areas in high performance calculation for scientific IT. But also, artificial intelligence as well as classic quantum computer,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia.
Huang was joined by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright who made this announcement last week at Berkeley Lab.
“It will lead to a huge progression of science, and it will also play a role in national defense,” said Wright. “And this is what makes it so critical that the United States leads to artificial intelligence.”
The new computer will be called Doudna, named after the teacher of the UC Berkeley Jennifer Doudna, which received the Nobel Prize in 2020 For his work in Gene Edition Technology Crispr.
“I can’t wait to see what Doudna is going to calculate,” she said. “For me, it really means the gathering of computer science and biology. This is the future. This is how the next breakthroughs will be made.”
The Doudna computer will be built by next year and will go online and will be available for scientists in 2027.
Currently, the Berkeley Lab is home to the Perlmutter supercomputer, which is the 19th fastest computer in the world, and part of the National Energy Research SuperComputing Center, known as Nersc, which links 11,000 scientists worldwide.
“Thus, NERSC is available for anyone looking for a scientific problem linked to the mission of the Ministry of Energy,” said Jonathan Carter, director of the Associate Laboratory for Computer Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
These missions include the creation of nuclear fusion simulations, biological research, climatic projections and even the mapping of the universe.
“So, imagine that you have a really inflated laptop or a game PC, and imagine that you could bring together 10,000, so that any program you are running could perform on all these 10,000 processors at the same time,” said Carter.
Once the sofa supercaluler is built, it should be at least 10 times faster than the Perlmutter computer.
Currently, The fastest computer in the world is El Capitanwhich is also hosted in the Bay region of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
