Berkeley Lab receives Cech, the early-access test system for Doudna

US Department of Energy/Doudna (NERSC-10)

NERSC took delivery in January 2026 of Cech, a small pilot system used to rehearse assembly, cooling and software before the full Doudna supercomputer arrives. It runs the previous NVIDIA generation (Grace CPUs and Blackwell GPUs) in Dell liquid-cooled racks, and full Doudna deployment is planned for late 2026.

• Delivered January 2026; named after Nobel chemist Thomas Cech.
• 72 Grace CPUs and 144 Blackwell GPUs on Quantum-X800 InfiniBand.
• 5.76 petaflop/s at 64-bit precision; one cabinet equals twice NERSC's 2014-2019 Edison system.
• Full-scale Doudna production system planned for late 2026.