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Cadence Design Systems on Wednesday unveiled a new supercomputer based on chips from Nvidia that will accelerate its software offerings for everything from chip development to jets to new drugs.
Cadence provides software that companies like Apple use to develop chips. In recent years, however, the company has expanded its offerings to help customers like Boom, a start-up that makes supersonic jets, design their airplanes, or biotech start-up Treeline Biosciences find new drug candidates through molecular simulations.
The software was originally developed for central processing units (CPUs) at a time when PCs were still widely used. On Wednesday, Cadence announced that many of these core programs have been redesigned to run on the latest "Blackwell" graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia.
Cadence's new Millennium M2000 supercomputer will contain about 32 of Nvidia's latest chips and cost about $1.5 million, depending on configuration. It follows on from a supercomputer launched last year that ran a more limited range of Cadence software.
The price is justified by improvements in speed.
Michael Jackson, corporate vice president and general manager of the System Design and Analysis Group at Cadence, said the company worked with Boeing to analyze turbulence around parts of a 777 jet. What would have taken eight days with a traditional CPU-based system could be done in less than 24 hours with the new supercomputer, allowing engineers to either do the same work in less time or use the extra time to make further design improvements.
"There is an insatiable need for faster simulations," Jackson explained in an interview with Reuters on May 6.
Jeff Grandy, vice president of Cadence Molecular Sciences, explained that molecular simulations to find promising drug candidates have been reduced from two days to about four minutes, allowing scientists to tinker with new molecule ideas in near real time.
"You used to have to wait several days for an answer to make a decision on your project," Grandy said in an interview on May 6. "Now you can really do it in a much more interactive way." (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Santa Clara, California; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman).
