The US Department of Energy (DOE) has selected Dell to supply the next supercomputer for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

Featuring Nvidia chips, the supercomputer will be named Doudna after UC Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna, who co-invented CRISPR gene editing technology.

Set to be deployed at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the supercomputer will be built with Nvidia's Vera Rubin GPUs and CPUs and is set to be built in 2026.

The system will use Dell's ORv3 direct liquid-cooled technology, Dell Integrated Rack Scalable Systems, and PowerEdge servers. It will also feature Nvidia's Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking.

Specifics were not shared, but the DOE said that the supercomputer will provide at least ten times the performance of Perlmutter, NERSC's current most powerful supercomputer.

Perlmutter is currently the 19th most powerful supercomputer in the world, per Top500, at 79.23 petaflops. It boasts 3.8 exaflops of theoretical AI performance.

Dell's Doudna win comes after the three previous largest supercomputers procured by the DOE were built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

“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.”

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, added: “Doudna is a time machine for science - compressing years of discovery into days. 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.”