15 Years of Trust: Honda, Cadence, and the Future of CFD

What does it take to transform promising research into simulation technology that engineers can trust with their real-world development decisions? For Honda and the Cascade Technologies team, now part of Cadence, the answer extended beyond algorithms, high-fidelity simulations, or compute power. It came down to 15 years of collaboration, experimentation, rigorous questioning, and, above all, trust.

Recently, the Honda R&D Center of Excellence (HGR) published a two-part blog series featuring Atsushi Ogawa, chief operating officer of HGR; Kei Ambo, a Honda aerodynamic engineer; Guillaume Brès, software engineering group director for Fidelity Charles R&D; and Frank Ham, fellow for Fidelity Charles R&D.

This two-part series provides a behind-the-scenes look at Honda’s long-standing collaboration with Cadence and the journey to advance Stanford-born computational fluid dynamics (CFD) research into technology capable of influencing real-world vehicle development.

Part 1 of the series traces the story back to 2011, when Cascade Technologies (now part of Cadence) was still a young company working to translate research from Stanford University into industrial applications. Honda recognized the potential of the team’s technology, but also posed a challenge: Could it deliver the accuracy and repeatability required for automotive development with results closely aligned to experimental data?

The journey that followed went far beyond improving a CFD solver. From racing-car aerodynamics to production vehicles, from solver and mesh development to rotating wheel capability, and eventually to GPU acceleration, Honda and Cadence worked side by side to address challenges that neither organization could have solved alone. One goal captures the ambition of the collaboration particularly well: reducing CFD errors from around 3% toward the 0.1% level needed to make simulation a far more powerful complement to physical testing.

What makes the story especially compelling is how that progress unfolded. Honda challenged Cadence to rethink assumptions, while Cadence encouraged Honda to explore new approaches. Engineers spent weeks together running simulations, examining results, changing conditions, and iterating. As the first article describes it, they were essentially standing on the same board, facing the same challenge.

Building on that foundation, Part 2 broadens the focus from achieving accuracy to transforming Honda’s development process. The collaboration, which began with a shared goal of making CFD more reliable, progressed to GPU acceleration, making high-fidelity simulation faster, more scalable, and more practical for real-world engineering—and eventually opened the door for the technology to spread into entirely new fields.

The second article also highlights how the collaboration evolved through three connected priorities: accuracy, automation, and acceleration. Together, these “three A’s” show how Honda and Cadence advanced from improving simulation fidelity to making complex CFD workflows faster and more usable across the development cycle.

One example clearly captures the impact: a simulation involving rotating wheels that previously took around 30 hours on CPUs was reduced to approximately 3 hours using 16 GPUs. That shift was not simply about speed; it changed what became possible within Honda’s engineering process.

Fifteen years later, a collaboration that began by untangling flow is connecting new worlds: fluid simulation and chip design, once separate, are now beginning to converge.

If you are interested in CFD, automotive aerodynamics, GPU-accelerated simulation, or the process of turning breakthrough research into technology engineers can depend on, this is a story worth reading!

→ Untangling Flow, Building Trust [Part 1] — 15 Years of Turning Stanford-Born CFD into a Technology Honda Could Trust

→ Untangling Flow, Building Trust [Part 2] — Beyond Aerodynamics: How a Technology Refined Together Is Accelerating Honda

Written by Veena Parthan, Lead Marketing Writer