In an effort to advance both artificial intelligence (AI) technology and scientific discovery, the US Department of Energy has built a new supercomputer called “Doudna,” named after 2020 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Jennifer Doudna, who is famous for her work on CRISPR gene editing.
The official announcement was made on May 29 at the University of California at Berkeley - where the supercomputer is located on the campus of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, witnessed by US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and leaders of Dell Technologies - the unit responsible for building the system.
“One of the main applications of Doudna will be genetics research,” said Dion Harris, Nvidia’s head of AI and supercomputing. “The name of the supercomputer is a tribute to Doudna’s outstanding contributions to molecular biology.”
Doudna will be the next supercomputer to be launched at Berkeley Lab's National Energy Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), which previously operated famous supercomputers such as Perlmutter (named after Nobel-winning physicist Saul Perlmutter) and Cori (named after biochemist Gerty Cori).
Although Doudna's specific ranking on the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is unknown, experts expect it to be one of the most powerful systems serving scientific research and AI when it officially goes into operation next year.
The Doudna supercomputer is not only intended to solve complex AI problems, but also to serve research that requires enormous computing power, especially in the field of genomics - the study of human and biological genomes.
This is especially meaningful in the context of CRISPR technology co-invented by biochemist Jennifer Doudna, which is opening a new era for medicine, allowing scientists to edit DNA to treat many incurable diseases.
Doudna will join the ranks of top supercomputers operating at US national laboratories. Currently, the TOP500 ranking is led by El Capitan - a supercomputer located at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (near Berkeley), followed by systems in Tennessee and Illinois./.
Source: https://www.vietnamplus.vn/my-xay-dung-sieu-may-tinh-doudna-de-thuc-day-nghien-cuu-ai-va-gene-hoc-post1041705.vnp
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