SC 24: NVIDIA Launches Omniverse Blueprint for Building Digital Twin

At Supercomputing 2024 (SC24), NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint designed specifically for CAE (computer-aided engineering) software developers. This new tool is expected to help simulation software vendors create real-time digital twins for their customers.

According to NVIDIA, “Altair, Ansys, Cadence, and Siemens can use the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for real-time computer-aided engineering (CAE) digital twins to help their customers drive down development costs and energy usage while getting to market faster. The blueprint is a reference workflow that includes NVIDIA acceleration libraries, physics-AI frameworks, and interactive physically based rendering to achieve 1,200x faster simulations and real-time visualization.”

The announcement serves as a signal to the manufacturers that templates are now in place to easily develop, build, and operate CAE-driven virtual replicas of real-world products and processes.

NVIDIA and Luminary Demonstrated Real-Time Virtual Wind Tunnel

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said, “Omniverse Blueprints are reference pipelines that connect NVIDIA Omniverse with AI technologies, enabling leading CAE software developers to build groundbreaking digital twin workflows that will transform industrial digitalization, from design and manufacturing to operations, for the world’s largest industries.”

As proof of concept, NVIDIA and partner Luminary Cloud demonstrated a virtual wind tunnel at SC24, allowing real-time CFD to simulate fluid dynamics. The test showed near-instant recalculation of the flow fields in response to changes in the vehicle model.

In 2019, NVIDIA previewed Omniverse at GTC, its GPU user conference, as a Beta technology. The company officially launched it in 2021. Since then, it has emerged as one of the few platforms to host interactive, real-time digital twins. Traditional CAE software vendors such Ansys, Siemens, and Altair offer simulation technology for engineering projects, but not an interactive, real-time visualization platform to satisfy digital twin operators. With NVIDIA Blueprint, leading CAE vendors could begin offering digital twin solutions to serve specific industries.

Ansys First to Adopt NVIDIA Blueprint

NVIDIA announced that developers could integrate Blueprint components as individual elements or in its entirety into their existing tools. Ansys became one of the first simulation software developer to adopt NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint. Ansys ran its CFD software Ansys Fluent at the Texas Advanced Computing Center on 320 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. “A 2.5-billion-cell automotive simulation was completed in just over six hours, which would have taken nearly a month running on 2,048 x86 CPU cores, significantly enhancing the feasibility of overnight high-fidelity CFD analyses and establishing a new industry benchmark,” according to NVIDIA.

“By integrating NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint with Ansys software, we’re enabling our customers to tackle increasingly complex and detailed simulations more quickly and accurately,” said Ajei Gopal, president and CEO of Ansys. 

Contract manufacturing titan Foxconn uses NVIDIA Omniverse to build and operate a digital twin of its factory. Image courtesy of NVIDIA.

Foxconn Builds Digital Twin in Omniverse

Foxconn, the Taiwan-based contract manufacturing giant, is helping NVIDIA produce its Blackwell GPUs. The company is also one the manufacturers using NVIDIA Omniverse to house its digital twin.

According to NVIDIA, “The company has built digital twins with Omniverse that allow their teams to virtually integrate facility and equipment information from leading industry applications, such as Siemens Teamcenter X and Autodesk Revit. Floor plan layouts are optimized first in the digital twin, and planners can locate optimal camera positions that help measure and identify ways to streamline operations with Metropolis visual AI agents ... Using NVIDIA Omniverse and AI, Foxconn plans to replicate its precision production lines across the world. This will enable it to quickly deploy high-quality production facilities that meet unified standards, increasing the company’s competitive edge and adaptability in the market.”

NVIDIA Blackwell testing and production are ongoing at its factories in U.S., Mexico, and Taiwan.

NVIDIA Releases CUDA-QX to Expand CUDA-Q

NVIDIA previously launched CUDA-Q, an open-source quantum development platform to orchestrate the hardware and software needed to run quantum computing applications. According to NVIDIA, “Accelerated quantum supercomputing combines the benefits of AI supercomputing with quantum processing units (QPUs) to develop solutions to some of the world’s hardest problems. Realizing such a device involves the seamless integration of one or more QPUs into a traditional CPU and GPU supercomputing architecture.”

At SC24, NVIDIA announced CUDA-QX, an extension of CUDA-Q comprising optimized libraries. The company said, “CUDA-QX provides optimized kernels and APIs for key quantum computing primitives. This lowers the threshold for researchers and developers to access CUDA-Q’s GPU acceleration, leaving you with more time to focus on novel science and application development rather than code optimization.”

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-omniverse-real-time-physics-digital-twinswith-industry-software-leaders

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