SANTA CLARA, California, May 7 (Reuters) - Cadence

Design Systems ( CDNS ) unveiled on Wednesday a new

supercomputer based on chips from Nvidia ( NVDA ) 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 ( AAPL )

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 ( NVDA ) latest "Blackwell" graphics

processors, or GPUs.

Cadence's new Millennium M2000 supercomputer will contain

about 32 of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) 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 ( BA ) 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.

Jeff Grandy, vice president of Cadence molecular sciences,

said that the molecule simulations to find promising drug

candidates shrank from two days to about four minutes, opening

the possibility that scientists could tinker with new molecule

ideas close to real time.

"Before, you would think about waiting several days to get

an answer and make a decision on your project," Grandy said in

an interview on May 6. "Now, you can really do that in a much

more interactive fashion."

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Santa Clara, California;

Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)