Tuesday, 10 June, 2025 / Edition 62

The desire to have our cake and eat it too is driving geos and energy professionals to move from machines capable of handling exclusively precision-heavy tasks—think nuclear modeling and climate simulations—to tasks in which AI can augment simulations in areas like geothermal energy and quantum computing.

This week, I go over a big win for Dell in the supercomputing world and look at how oil and gas tech could potentially boost the offshore wind niche. Let’s dig in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Versatility: The Future of Supercomputing

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Speed and precision are often seen as mutually exclusive, but Dell Technologies, Nvidia, and the DOE are coming together to change that with Dell’s “Doudna” supercomputer.

The latest: Doudna, named after biochemist and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, whose groundbreaking work on CRISPR gene editing significantly impacted molecular biology, is scheduled to come online in 2026 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Why it matters:

• Doudna is expected to be more than 10 times faster than the lab’s current system, making it the Department of Energy’s most powerful resource for training AI models and conducting advanced simulations.

• The architecture needs to meet the needs of the laboratory’s 11,000 users and will also be tightly integrated with the Energy Sciences Network, allowing researchers nationwide to stream data directly into Doudna for real-time analysis.

New leader: The supercomputer space is traditionally dominated by giants such as Hewlett Packard, but Dell Technologies’ growing prowess in building large commercial AI systems won the day.

How it works:

• The supercomputer’s architecture combines high-precision, 64-bit computing with lower-precision, but faster, 8- and 16-bit instructions.

• The new machine will use Nvidia’s Rubin chip, alongside general-purpose processors built on Arm architecture, rather than the Intel or Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) chips typically used.

  • If you’re interested in more details on the chip and how it works, read this article. The TLDR is it has 3.3 times more computing power than Nvidia’s other recently developed chips.

What they’re saying:

• “This market had shifted into some form of autopilot. What we did was disengage the autopilot,” said Paul Perez, senior vice president and senior technology fellow at Dell Technologies.

• “Doudna is a time machine for science—compressing years of discovery into days,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder and CEO. He added that it will let “scientists delve deeper and think bigger to seek the fundamental truths of the universe.”

Go deeper: To learn more about the Doudna supercomputer, look here and here.

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How Oil and Gas Tech Could Potentially Boost Offshore Wind

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It can seem odd when an oil and gas company starts a new “green energy” arm, but the reason behind the switch is economic, environmental, and, in some cases, a result of groundwork having already been laid.

Leading the way: Oil and gas has a lot to offer green energy, including people with the right skills (cough, cough, geoscientists) and our technology, which has been honed and upgraded through more than a century of operations.

The latest: A new article covers how offshore wind could potentially benefit from riffing off oil and gas technology.

Why it matters:

• Much like an iceberg, the turbines we see above water have much more going on beneath the surface, including a subsea foundation that exists in a dynamic and challenging environment.

• Soft soils are a major concern for structural integrity.

• When a subsea structure exists, sediments can be removed by currents in a process called scour, which impacts foundation stability.

Riffing off oil and gas tech: Oil and gas companies have been working to improve subsea foundations for decades. For example:

• Suction piles embed the foundation in seabed soil, evacuate soil from the foundation, then overlay a grout-based partition layer on top of the soil.

• The goal is to reduce settlement under large loads without the need to increase the foundation size and has been developed to improve foundation strength when installed in soft soils.

Tech that could help:

• Balmoral’s HexDefence scour protection system originated from existing vortex-induced vibration suppression designs developed to address erosion around offshore wind turbine foundations without the need for rock dumping.

  • The HexDefence name comes from the protection system’s panels, which look a bit like big hexagonal shields. These are arranged to reduce the velocity of water flow around the base of a subsea structure.

• A tension-leg platform is a type of floating offshore structure that is anchored to the seabed using tethers held in tension. These are particularly useful in deepwater operations where fixed jackets are not feasible.

• A development by GE Renewables Technologies (now GE Vernova) improves stiffness by providing anchoring tendons with a number of segments and differing structural and/or mechanical characteristics depending on sea depth.

Bigger takeaway: Knowledge is power in so many ways, and much like an exploration geologist pouring through old logs to find untapped pay, companies that dig through their existing but dusty IP might find some hidden treasures.

Go deeper: For more information, including patent numbers, behind the tech we covered, go here.

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✉️ To get in touch with Sarah or suggest a topic for Enspired, send an email to editorial@aapg.org.