Anirudh Devgan Unveils AI Engineering Design Supercomputer Using Nvidia Chips
By Reuters | 07 May, 2025

Nvidia's Jensen Huang returned the favor by buying 10 of the new Cadence AI design systems to speed up design of new chips and AI data center equipment.

Cadence Design Systems, led by Anirudh Devgan, unveiled on Wednesday a new supercomputer based on chips from Nvidia that will speed up its software offerings for everything from designing chips to jets to new drugs.

Cadence supplies software that firms such as Apple use to design chips. But over the past several years, it has expanded to help customers such as Boom, a startup making supersonic jets, design their planes, or biotech startup Treeline Biosciences find new drug candidates by simulating molecules.

Its software was originally written with central processor units, or CPUs, in mind during an era when PCs were common. On Wednesday, Cadence announced that it has reworked many of those core programs to run on Nvidia's latest "Blackwell" graphics processors, or GPUs.

Cadence's new Millennium M2000 supercomputer will contain about 32 of Nvidia's newest chips and will cost about $1.5 million, depending on how customers choose to configure it. It follows a supercomputer released last year that ran a more limited set of Cadence's software.

The price will buy 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 on analyzing turbulence around parts of a 777 jet.

What would have taken eight days on a traditional CPU-based system took less than 24 hours on the new supercomputer, enabling engineers to either get the same work done in less time or use the extra time to carry out further design refinements.

"There's this insatiable need for faster simulation," Jackson told Reuters in an interview on May 6.

At an event hosted by Cadence in Santa Clara, California, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined Cadence CEO Anirudh Devgan on stage and said Nvidia will purchase 10 of the new supercomputers to design the next generation of its chips and AI data center equipment.

"This is a big deal for us. We started building our data center to get ready for it," Huang said. "We'll speed it up 50, 60, 100 times," Huang said the design work Nvidia will do with the machines.

 Prior to becoming CEO in 2021, Devgan was President of Cadence.  He has led Cadence's growth of computational software and hardware portfolio, expanded into adjacent and new markets, and achieved several years of record revenue growth, according to Cadence's official website. Prior to joining Cadence in 2012 Devgan was Corporate VP and member of the executive staff at Magma Design Automation.  He had also held various management and technical roles at IBM.

Devgan is a leading authority in electronic design automation (EDA) and successfully pioneered the application of massively parallel and distributed architectures to create several industry firsts.  His most impactful products have been in the areas of SPICE simulation, library characterization, place and route, static timing, power, and electromagnetics. He also drove the first common compiler architecture for emulation and prototyping platforms.

Devgan has published numerous research papers, and holds 27 US patents. His awards include the prestigious Phil Kaufman Award for his extensive contributions to EDA.  He serves on the boards of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and the Electronic System Design Alliance.

Devgan received a Bachelor of Technology degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and MS and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

 (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Santa Clara, California; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Nick Zieminski; Biographical information added from Cadence official website with some editing by Goldsea staff)