A powerful new supercomputer named “Doudna” will soon support cutting-edge artificial intelligence and scientific research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, federal officials announced Thursday according to the Associated Press.

The machine, named in honor of UC Berkeley professor and Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna, is scheduled to go online next year. Doudna was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for co-developing CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing technology.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright unveiled the project alongside Dell Technologies executives and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Dell has been contracted to build the system, while Nvidia will provide the high-performance AI computing hardware.

“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. “It was basically just a nod to her contributions to the field.”

Housed at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Doudna will join a lineage of supercomputers named after Nobel laureates, including Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist, and Gerty Cori, a biochemist.

The system’s AI capabilities are expected to support a wide range of scientific endeavors, from energy innovation to climate modeling and genetic research. Its exact ranking among the world’s fastest computers remains to be seen. The current top system, El Capitan, is located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory just an hour away. It is followed by other U.S. systems at national labs in Tennessee and Illinois.

Doudna’s arrival marks another step in expanding the role of AI in scientific discovery and positions the Bay Area as a continued hub for supercomputing and advanced research.

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