Happy Exascale Day!

Did you that the 18th of October each year is celebrated as Exascale Day? 

October 18 = 10/18 = 10**18 = 1 quintillion = how many operations an exascale computer can do in a second. By way of comparison, the Milky Way Galaxy is one quintillion kilometers across and Adele's new single got one quintillion views on YouTube the day it was dropped last week (not really, jk).

As of 10/18/2021, exascale computing is largely aspirational. The US' first exascale computer is Oak Ridge National Labs' Frontier which will be available to researchers in 2022. Despite the current lack of hardware, our exascale aspirations are driving computational technology forward. My primary example should come as no surprise to those who know me; the CFD Vision 2030 Study places exploitation of exascale computing platforms at the top of its roadmap for achieving the Vision's goals.

So what are we doing about exascale today?

A perfect example is the Cadence Clarity 3D electromagnetics simulation software with which can help you design interconnects on printed circuit boards (PCBs) and integrated circuit (IC) packages. Recently rewritten from the ground up, massive parallelism is supported from the start and is implemented at the algorithmic level (versus you having to cut up your problem). The result is around a 10X reduction in simulation time while maintaining gold-standard accuracy.

If that's not enough, the Cadence Clarity 3D Cloud Solver provides nearly unbounded compute capacity with push-button deployment and security.

On the CFD side of things, a fully-coupled simulation of a gas turbine done software from the Omnis suite was able to exploit 144 cores to decrease the turnaround time. In general, the Omnis/Turbo CFD solution exhibits linear scaling on thousands of cores with convergence accelerated further by our patented CPUBooster technology.

And mesh generation is being accelerated as well. The Cadence Pointwise Meshing software is fully multi-threaded and a recent update increased the speed of surface meshing by up to a factor of 5 on desktop systems. In addition, we've already started work on accelerating the performance of volume mesh generation with our T-Rex algorithm and preliminary results are quite impressive.*

These are just a few of the things Cadence has that are moving the needle toward exascale computing. So celebrate Exascale Day by enjoying all things that run fast and know that they'll continue to get faster.

And by the way, October 18th also happens to be National Chocolate Cupcake Day. How long would it take to eat a quintillion cupcakes?

If you'd like to more about Cadence CFD products, visit our website.

*This article contains forward-looking statements regarding Cadence’s business or products. Actual results may differ materially from the information presented here.