NVIDIA HAS INCREASED EXPONENTIALLY in the past five years, with growth in their technology led by CEO Jensen Huang. He is driven by a passion for technologies that create a better world with efficient technologies that can help solve problems like climate change, supply chain issues, and medical research.
AI and Simulation
First off, Omniverse, NVIDIA’s simulation for creating and connecting virtual worlds, is becoming more powerful with new tools, including Omniverse Avatar, for creating digital avatars with embodied AI’s in the virtual world. The Omniverse Avatar platform allows companies to create avatars that people can interact with. This uses NVIDIA’s speech AI, computer vision, understanding of language cues with recommendations, and realistic simulation technologies.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is represented here in his AI avatar answering complex questions.
A demonstration of a toy version of CEO Jensen Huang (part of Project Tokkio) being asked complicated questions using words and included the natural movement of the body and hand gestures people do when they communicate, creating a very natural looking avatar.
Those watching the keynote were treated to a demonstration of Project Tokkio technology, wherein a toy version of CEO Jensen Huang was being asked complicated questions using words. A natural-looking avatar (“toy me” of Huang) answered using natural body movements and hand gestures typically used by real humans.
Omniverse
Project Tokkio is a customer service kiosk with an Omniverse Maxine-powered AI talking to customers. Omniverse Replicator is a synthetic data engine that will help businesses create more accurate digital twins creating better AI tools for our world.
What the Omniverse looks like diagrammatically. Omniverse connects physical worlds and their data and systems with applications and their data and even other Omniverse worlds.
Omniverse Replicator has two applications. NVIDIA Drive Sim gives us a digital twin of vehicles to see how they drive in the virtual world before putting them on the road. NVIDIA Isaac Sim creates a digital twin of manipulating robots. Replicator allows companies to use this technology to learn “effective” skills in the virtual environment before being used in the real world for production or any situation.
Architects deal with many-layered complexities in creating and designing. A digital twin of a project could help solve engineering, structural, and manufacturing obstacles early in the design stage. The client can view the project in real-time and watch the progress and actively participate in the process. You can develop a virtual twin to test the limitations of a design. You can see the pitfalls before you have built something and create changes in real-time.
New NVIDIA Omniverse technologies or apps include Showroom, Farm, AR, and VR. These are all in beta except VR which will feature the first RTX accelerated real-time raytracing technology inside a headset.
Imagine the possibilities of Omniverse with real-time collaboration across multiple artists with the ability to access talent across the world. It gives architects flexibility without the worry of expanding their office space.
Omniverse has new features, including Showroom, Farm, AR, and VR.
Omniverse in Industry
Omniverse launched in December 2020 and has been downloaded by 70,000 people. Professionals at 700 companies are using Omniverse including gaming, CAD, medical imaging, autonomous vehicle developers, and creatives in Film & Television.
Omniverse Enterprise is available on November 9th. It allows design teams working across different software packages using the USD format to collaborate in real-time, in a shared virtual space on any device with access to global teams around the world. Huang said during his keynote that “Omniverse will revolutionize how the 43 million designers in the world collaborate.”
NVIDIA’s Omniverse has been popular with the industry, with thousands of companies already testing it and putting it to work.
A few Fortune 500 companies and global design leaders demonstrated their use of Omniverse including HKS Architects, KPF Architects, Ericsson, Lockheed Martin, CannonDesign, Epigraph, and Sony Pictures Animation.
CannonDesign is a global architecture, engineering, and consulting firm using Omniverse Enterprise to speed up collaborative design. Sony Pictures is using Omniverse Enterprise to enable multiple artists to work on a single scene together in real-time. Ericsson is a leading telecommunications company using the Omniverse platform to create digital twins of cities to simulate and visualize signal propagation to accelerate feature development and insights into their 5G networks.
NVIDIA Omniverse will allow designers working around the globe to collaborate on 3D scenes together in real-time, each working in their own preferred software tools around their own specialization or area of interest. Noted architectural firms like KPF, HKS, and CannonDesign have all embraced Omniverse technology and are trialing solution workflows.
Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, announced the availability of Bentley iTwin for NVIDIA Omniverse which can enable next-generation physically accurate 4D visualization and construction simulation of infrastructure digital twins for the global infrastructure engineering industry.
Bentley iTwin will allow companies to explore and visualize massive infrastructure in a virtual world like they are walking through it in real-time. Ersi, a leading urban design mapping software, is bringing Omniverse into the Ersi ArcGIS City Engine application connecting millions of ArcGIS ecosystem users to the Omniverse platform. Teams can apply full 3D city models and geographic content with photorealism, giving companies and end-users the ability to create digital twins in the virtual worlds of Omniverse.
USD at the center Omniverse
USD (Universal Scene Description) is a file format and is at the heart of Omniverse. USD was invented at Pixar and the current USD format is roughly the fourth generation of Pixar’s “composed scene description” technology.
In August of this year, Apple, NVIDIA, and Pixar joined forces to expand USD to perform physics in the Omniverse in a consistent way as the real world. In other words, simulations obey the laws of physics. Even more important, the joint work by NVIDIA, Apple, and Pixar enable the new physics extensions for USD to be flexible letting developers select which solvers to work with but all driven by the same data set of USD. Gamers prioritize speed over accuracy while architects and engineers prioritize accuracy over speed.
Bentley has announced its integrations with NVIDIA Omniverse with its iTwins digital twins’ technology.
Omniverse uses USD (Universal Scene Description) to create the assets inside the virtual world across many leading applications. Software companies supporting USD include Graphisoft, Autodesk, Unreal Engine, Adobe, and many more. “USD is the HTML of 3D,” stated Richard Kerris, VP of NVIDIA Omniverse. In the keynote, NVIDIA CEO Huang stated that there are 14 connectors that link apps together through Omniverse and 15 more are under development.
BMW is using NVIDIA Omniverse to build digital twins of factories and digital twin robots and humans and to simulate new factory designs in Omniverse before commencing with physical designs. This enables them to test out scenarios and optimize factory conditions.
NVIDIA made the announcement that there are four new features coming to Omniverse—Showroom, Farm, AR, and VR. All of them are in beta now except VR.
Omniverse is set to transform the way designers and creatives work together around the globe while enabling each designer to bring to bear on common projects their specialized skills, knowledge, and their preferred software tools, while they jointly and in real-time work on projects together literally within the same 3D environments (scenes).
next page: NVIDIA Quantum-2 Supercomputer, CUDA-X, Modulus, and Summary
New NVIDIA Offerings
Additional announcements at GTC showcased a wide range of NVIDIA products and initiatives, including virtual reality, enterprise AI, cybersecurity, quantum computing, automotive, medical, scientific research, and architecture. NVIDIA laid out its plans for a higher level of supercomputing. Here is a summary of several items at different levels of detail:
NVIDIA QUANTUM-2 — is a new type of supercomputer that provides the bare metal performance of a supercomputer with the security of multi-tenant cloud computing. “This has never been done before,” said CEO Jensen Huang. “It is cloud-native supercomputing.”
The convergence of accelerated computing (fundamentally new tech stacks), AI deep learning optimized new code, and data-level scale and new types of applications are accelerating compute 1 million times.
It’s a 400GB InfiniBand platform. 224k GB per second. 1.5x the total traffic over the Internet. The product is sampling now.
NVIDIA Bluefield — DOCA 1.2, and Morpheus supercharge developers deploying accelerated cybersecurity on cloud-native architecture with behavior-analysis and threat detection 600x faster than CPU only. Zero trust platform combines NVIDIA Bluefield DPU’s, NVIDIA DOC, and NVIDIA Morpheus cybersecurity AI framework.
NVIDIA Quantum-2 is a new type of supercomputer that provides the performance of traditional supercomputers with the advantages of multi-tenant cloud computing. Its capabilities and industry users are wide and include things like cybersecurity.
It enables development partners to bring high-level security to data centers—by allowing applications from infrastructure by supercharging next-generation firewalls and by bringing the power of accelerated computing and deep learning to continuously monitor and detect threats. It speeds up the process by 600X faster than servers without NVIDIA acceleration.
NVIDIA Bluefield DPU offloads cybersecurity computing functions from the CPU to the Bluefield DPU bringing treat protection from the perimeter to the edge.
The device itself is Bluefield-3 — InfiniBand PCIx devices plug into Quantum-2. Each features a 64-bit 16-core ARM processor with 22 billion transistors (TSMC 7N) with 400 Gbps Crypto Accelerators. 4x networking computing performance, 2x GPUDirect throughput. The device is sampling in May.
NVIDIA’s Bluefield-3 controller for cybersecurity plugs into the Quantum-2 and uses InfinityBand technology and is built around a 64-bit 16-core ARM processor with 22 billion transistors.
NVIDIA Reopt — Reoptimize Logistics and Supply Chain in Real-Time. Accelerated Solver for the vehicle routes, picking, warehouse selection, and fleet mix. Optimization. Rerouting saves travel time and saves money.
NVIDIA cuQuantum — cuQuantum for quantum computing enables large quantum circuits to be simulated instantly faster, allowing quantum researchers to study a broader space of algorithms and applications.
NVIDIA has set a world record for quantum computing simulations with cuQuantum running on GDX Super POD.
NVIDIA cuNumeric — A new library to accelerate NumPy for scientists and machine learning researchers in Python.
- CUDA-X accelerated DGL container.
CUDA-X is for graph neural networks and offers scientists, researchers, and data scientists working on GNNs with large graphs a quick way to set up a working environment. The container simplifies the integrated, GPU-accelerated GNN environment combining DGL and PyTorch. GPU accelerated GNN’s can be mined for insights even with the largest graphs in the world approaching a trillion edges to a single graph.
Pinterest uses graph neural networks with billions of nodes and edges to understand their ecosystem of over 300 billion pins based on GPU-optimized libraries for training and inference models.
Modulus. — A framework for building Physics-ML models. Modulus is designed to build physics simulations on a huge scale. Modulus is customizable and easy to adopt. It offers APIs for implementing new physics and geometry. The framework comes with step-by-step tutorials for getting started in computational fluid dynamics.
NVIDIA Modulus technologies are aimed at tackling climate change and are a framework for building Physics-ML models designed to run physics simulations on a huge scale.
This technology is about attempting to tackle climate change prediction at the global scale (Earth scale). Million X Climate Science. “10,000 to 100,000 times higher resolution than any weather simulation done today,” said CEO Jensen Huang during his keynote. “There are no computers big enough that we can build. We need a computer science breakthrough.” He said, “The largest reservoirs in the US are at record low levels in two decades, some 150 feet below what they were.” To solve climate change we need this new type of computing power. “We can create a digital twin of the Earth that runs continuously to predict the future.”
In a few years’ time, NVIDIA technologies may be able to link global live weather data and feed it into a digital twin of the Earth running in Omniverse.
On Modulus, seven days of prediction takes only a 1/4 second on a GPU. “That’s 100,000x faster than simulation,” he said. “Hopefully in a couple of years, real data will flow into a digital twin of Earth running in Omniverse.”
NVIDIA Riva Speech AI — A huge new software development of advanced speech AI. A demonstration of Project Maxine integrates Riva’s real-time translation and text-to-speech with photo animation “live portrait” and eye contact in real-time. The avatar was able to speak in many languages and adapt its facial features accordingly.
NVIDIA Isaac ROS — New Isaac ROS GEM brings NVIDIA Robotics AI to the ROS Community.
NVIDIA Clara Discovery — Santos transforms drug discovery and design with AI-powered molecular simulation. Santos is applying to revolutionize drug design using AI that enables a thousandfold acceleration in molecular properties prediction. Clara Discovery is a collection of state-of-the-art frameworks, applications, and pre-trained models built to unlock insights into how billions of drug molecules interact inside our bodies. This could reduce side effects and adverse reactions.
Drug discovery as an industry is totally transformed by computer science. NVIDIA Clara Discovery is one piece of transforming technology in combination with NVIDIA’s high-performance GPU compute technologies.
“The opportunities space has multiplied a million fold,” said Huang, “…to generate new forms structured proteins… to create hundreds of thousands of protein structures, opening up a gigantic unexplored space of new opportunities. We are witnessing the dawn of the biology revolution.”
In Summary
NVIDIA is creating and advancing secure working technologies we take for granted like cybersecurity, the flow of the supply chain, and so much more. CEO Jensen Huang is passionate about his work at NVIDIA and creating technologies for a better world.
I admit I was completely blown away by the demonstration of predicting Climate Change in the future using NVIDIA’s tech. Omniverse is a masterpiece creating simulated connections into the Metaverse with many options for enterprise and individual users. Currently the public open beta of Omniverse is only available for Windows and Linux. You can download Omniverse here.
Notice the year in this image. Mankind is in a dire situation to accelerate knowledge of climate change’s impact on Earth and to reduce carbon in our atmosphere by utilizing carbon-free energy sources to power our world.
The pandemic created an environment for innovation and adaptability. Companies either changed to embrace the future of technology or struggled to adapt to a much more complex set of rules. NVIDIA is adapting and creating solutions for all of us.
Architects reading this will find many of the technologies noted above beyond the scope of their current pipelines, but certainly many are going to transform their future pipelines. Moreover, many of these technologies will be an essential part of their everyday life from driving, to ordering from warehouses in the supply chain for their projects. Omniverse can create a new workforce and a much more democratic world. You can work remotely from anywhere, giving access to talent across the globe. If I were to describe everything, I saw in one word at GTC 2021 this year it would be LIMITLESS.
Resources
We offered you a summary of his one-and-a-half-hour-long keynote above. We encourage you to watch the keynote as well, time permitting.