System promises a 10x increase in 'scientific output' - not necessarily performance

The US Department of Energy's next supercomputer will be built by Dell Technologies and powered by Nvidia's next-gen Vera-Rubin accelerators - a notable switch from the usual Cray-AMD tag teams that build such machines. It's the first DOE win for Nvidia since the Venado system in 2022.

Named for Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, who pioneered CRISPR gene editing tech, the Doudna system is set to make its debut at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California next year.

Compared to its predecessor, Perlmutter, the system promises to deliver a 10x increase in "scientific output" while consuming just 2-3x the power.

On first blush, that suggests the system should squeeze 790 petaFLOPS of double precision performance from between 5.8 and 8.7 megawatts of power, making it the most power-efficient supercomputer on record by a wide margin.

However, that probably won't end up being the case.

While ...