Cadence Design Systems, the company known for its software used by AMD and Nvidia to design CPUs and GPUs, has quietly entered the supercomputer business.
In a move reminiscent of Apple's strategy of aligning hardware and software, Cadence unveiled its own supercomputer, the M1, designed to run large-scale, high-speed computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
The M1 is part of Cadence's new Millennium enterprise multiphysics platform, which also includes the first generation of AI-assisted CFD software. This software, also called M1, is a GPU-resident version of the large-eddy CFD simulator from Cadence's Fidelity CFD suite. With this combination, Cadence aims to provide 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 its design, based on CPU hosts with GPU accelerators and high-speed interconnects, similar to other AI and HPC supercomputers. Cadence has not revealed its specific choice of compute engines or interconnects, but it is believed to have chosen Intel Millennium computing. system.
What sets Cadence's supercomputer apart is that the solvers at the heart of the Fidelity M1 large eddy simulator reside in the GPUs. This means that M1 code runs natively on GPUs entirely, unlike many other GPU-accelerated applications.
“GPU computing in CFD is still fairly new,” said Alex Gatzemeier, director of product management for CFD at Cadence. The next platform. “Most of our customers, and basically most of the industry, still rely heavily on CPU-based HPC systems. CFD doesn't have the same size and scale as AI on GPUs today, but it's still hard to get GPUs, it's hard to tune them to scale across, say, ten or twenty nodes in the cloud. That remains a challenge. Millennium provides a turnkey solution. So there's no overhead, you can basically go to the cloud and get started in minutes. Or send Millennium to your own data center and connect as many nodes as you need.”
While pricing has yet to be revealed, you can find more information about the M1 on Cadence's site.
