NVIDIA unveils Omniverse Cloud platform and OVX system

NVIDIA has announced Omniverse Cloud, a cloud services platform, and OVX, a computing system designed to power large-scale digital twins.

The company says Omniverse Cloud, which will be available on billions of devices, offers instant access to the NVIDIA Omniverse platform.

It is designed to equip artists, creators, designers and developers with a suite of cloud services that will allow them the opportunity to collaborate on 3D design projects.

One of the services offered by Omniverse Cloud is Nucleus Cloud. This instant sharing tool allows artists to access and edit large 3D scenes from a location of their choosing without transferring massive datasets.

Nucleus Cloud also includes Omniverse Create, an app for technical designers, artists and creators to build 3D worlds in real-time interactively.

Additionally, its app, named View, is tailor-made for non-technical users to view Omniverse scenes by streaming full simulation and rendering capabilities using the NVIDIA GeForce NOW platform, powered by NVIDIA RTX GPUs in the cloud.

"Designers working remotely collaborate as if in the same studio. Factory planners work inside a digital twin of the real plant to design a new production flow," NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang says.

"Software engineers test a new software build on the digital twin of a self-driving car before releasing it to the fleet.

"A new wave of work is coming that can only be done in virtual worlds.

"Omniverse Cloud will connect tens of millions of designers and creators, and billions of future AIs and robotic systems."

NVIDIA explains that using Omniverse Cloud affords creators the ability to iterate, share and collaborate on models stored in Nucleus Cloud from anywhere and instantly invite other collaborators to join a session by sending a link.

The company adds that users or teams without high-end GeForce or NVIDIA RTX systems, or the desire to stand up IT infrastructure, can utilise Omniverse Create and View by subscribing to the Omniverse Cloud program.

In his keynote address at NVIDIA GTC, Huang played a demo of the future of the Omniverse Cloud platform depicting three human designers and one specialist Omniverse Avatar AI designer collaborating virtually using the platform, making design changes to an architectural project.

The team communicated using a standard web conferencing tool while connected in a scene hosted in Nucleus Cloud. One human designer ran the Omniverse View app on their RTX-powered workstation, while the other two streamed Omniverse View from GeForce NOW to their laptop and tablet.

"At KPF, we value the ability of our designers to collaborate as seamlessly as possible by making cloud-first technologies available to them when they need it," Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, director of Applied Research Cobus Bothma, says.

"Omniverse Cloud fits perfectly into that practice with the promise of excelling our visual and 3D design collaboration abilities by enabling our teams to work in Omniverse from any device, anywhere."

NVIDIA says OVX is purpose-built to operate complex digital twin simulations that will run within Omniverse Cloud.

Furthermore, it says the OVX system combines high-performance GPU-accelerated compute, graphics and AI with high-speed storage access, low-latency networking and precision timing to enable the performance needed to create digital twins with real-world accuracy.

OVX will simulate complex digital twins for modelling buildings, factories, and cities in their entirety.

"Physically accurate digital twins are the future of how we design and build," NVIDIA vice president of Professional Visualization Bob Pette says.

"Digital twins will change how every industry and company plans. The OVX portfolio of systems will be able to power true, real-time, always-synchronous, industrial-scale digital twins across industries."

OVX will enable designers, engineers and planners to build digital twins accurate to real-world architectural structures or create large-scale, true-to-reality simulated environments with precise time synchronisation across physical and virtual worlds.

Furthermore, companies will be able to evaluate and test complex systems and processes with multiple autonomous systems interacting in the same space-time.

This will mean they can optimise, expand or create more efficient factories and warehouses or train robots and autonomous vehicles before sending them into the physical world.

One such company that has already adopted the use of Omniverse is DB Netze, as part of the sector initiative "Digitale Schiene Deutschland" (Digital Rail for Germany).

DB Netze is using Omniverse to build a digital twin of Germany's national railway network to train systems for automatic train operation and to enable AI-enhanced predictive analysis for unforeseen situations in railway operations.

"Using a photorealistic digital twin to train and test AI-enabled trains will help us develop more precise perception systems to optimally detect and react to incidents," DB Netze, head of Railway Digitization Annika Hundertmark, says.

"In our current project, NVIDIA OVX will provide the scale, performance and compute capabilities that we need to generate data for intensive machine learning development and operate these highly complex simulations and scenarios."

NVIDIA says the OVX server consists of eight NVIDIA A40 GPUs, three NVIDIA ConnectX-6 Dx 200Gbps NICs, 1TB system memory and 16TB NVMe storage.

The OVX computing system can fast-track large-scale digital twin simulations by using a single pod of eight OVX servers to an OVX SuperPOD consisting of 32 OVX servers connected with NVIDIA Spectrum-3 switch fabric or multiple OVX SuperPODs.

The complete Omniverse Cloud collection of services is under development. Nucleus Cloud is accepting applications for early access.

NVIDIA OVX will be available later this year through Inspur, Lenovo and Supermicro.