Cadence Design Systems, the company known for its software used by AMD and Nvidia to design CPUs and GPUs, has quietly entered the supercomputing world.
In a move reminiscent of Apple’s strategy to align hardware and software, Cadence unveiled its own supercomputer, the M1, designed to perform computational fluid dynamics (CFD) on a large scale and at high speed.
The M1 is part of Cadence’s new Millennium Enterprise Multiphysics Platform, which also includes the first generation of AI-enabled CFD software. Also called M1, this software is a GPU-resident version of the large eddy CFD simulator from Cadence’s Fidelity CFD suite. With this combination, Cadence aims to deliver a two orders of magnitude improvement in the accuracy, speed and scale of CFD simulations in industries such as aerospace, defense, automotive, electronics and industrial design.
Nvidia and AMD hardware
The Millennium supercomputer is unique in design, based on CPU hosts with GPU accelerators and high-speed connections, similar to other AI and HPC supercomputers. Cadence has not disclosed its specific choice of compute engines or interconnects, but it is believed to have chosen Intel computing power in the millennium system.
What sets Cadence’s supercomputer apart is that the solvers at the heart of the Fidelity M1 large vortex simulator reside in the GPUs. This means that the M1 code runs entirely natively on the GPUs, unlike many other GPU-accelerated applications.
“GPU computing in CFD is still relatively new,” said Alex Gatzemeier, product management director for CFD at Cadence. The next platform. “Most of our customers, and in fact most of the industry, still rely heavily on CPU-based HPC systems. CFD doesn’t have the same size and scale that AI has today on GPUs, but it’s still hard to get GPUs, it’s hard to scale them across, say, ten or twenty nodes in the cloud. That is still a challenge. Millennium offers a turnkey solution. So there’s no overhead, you can basically go to the cloud and get started in minutes. Or you can have Millennium sent to your own data center, you connect as many nodes as you need.”
Although prices have not yet been announced, you can find more information about the M1 at Cadence’s website.