Posts in category: nVidia AI

In his first live keynote since the pandemic, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang today kicked off the COMPUTEX conference in Taipei, announcing platforms that companies can use to ride a historic wave of generative AI that’s transforming industries from advertising to manufacturing to telecom.

“We’re back,” Huang roared as he took the stage after years of virtual keynotes, some from his home kitchen. “I haven’t given a public speech in almost four years — wish me luck!”

Speaking for nearly two hours to a packed house of some 3,500, he described accelerated computing services, software and systems that are enabling new business models and making current ones more efficient.

“Accelerated computing and AI mark a reinvention of computing,” said Huang, whose travels in his hometown over the past week have been tracked daily by local media.

In a demonstration of its power, he used the massive 8K wall he spoke in front of to show a text prompt generating a theme song for his keynote, singable as any karaoke tune. Huang, who occasionally bantered with the crowd in his native Taiwanese, briefly led the audience in singing the new anthem.

“We’re now at the tipping point of a new computing era with accelerated computing and AI that’s been embraced by almost every computing and cloud company in the world,” he said, noting 40,000 large companies and 15,000 startups now use NVIDIA technologies with 25 million downloads of CUDA software last year alone.

Top News Announcements From the Keynote

• Grace Hopper powers big-memory supercomputers for gen AI.
• Modular reference architecture enables 100+ accelerated server configurations.
• WPP, NVIDIA create digital ad content engine in Omniverse.
• SoftBank, NVIDIA build 5G, gen AI data centers in Japan.
• Networking technology accelerates Ethernet-based AI clouds.
• NVIDIA ACE for Games breathes life into characters with gen AI.
• Electronics manufacturers worldwide embrace NVIDIA AI.

A New Engine for Enterprise AI

For enterprises that need the ultimate in AI performance, he unveiled DGX GH200, a large-memory AI supercomputer. It uses NVIDIA NVLink to combine up to 256 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips into a single data-center-sized GPU.

The GH200 Superchip, which Jensen said is now in full production, combines an energy-efficient NVIDIA Grace CPU with a high-performance NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU in one superchip.

The DGX GH200 packs an exaflop of performance and 144 terabytes of shared memory, nearly 500x more than in a single NVIDIA DGX A100 320GB system. That lets developers build large language models for generative AI chatbots, complex algorithms for recommender systems, and graph neural networks used for fraud detection and data analytics.

Google Cloud, Meta and Microsoft are among the first expected to gain access to the DGX GH200, which can be used as a blueprint for future hyperscale generative AI infrastructure.

“DGX GH200 AI supercomputers integrate NVIDIA’s most advanced accelerated computing and networking technologies to expand the frontier of AI,” Huang told the audience in Taipei, many of whom had lined up outside the hall for hours before the doors opened.

NVIDIA is building its own massive AI supercomputer, NVIDIA Helios, coming online this year. It will use four DGX GH200 systems linked with NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking to supercharge data throughput for training large AI models.

The DGX GH200 forms the pinnacle of hundreds of systems announced at the event. Together, they’re bringing generative AI and accelerated computing to millions of users.

Zooming out to the big picture, Huang announced more than 400 system configurations are coming to market powered by NVIDIA’s latest Hopper, Grace, Ada Lovelace and BlueField architectures. They aim to tackle the most complex challenges in AI, data science and high performance computing.

Acceleration in Every Size

To fit the needs of data centers of every size, Huang announced NVIDIA MGX, a modular reference architecture for creating accelerated servers. System makers will use it to quickly and cost-effectively build more than a hundred different server configurations to suit a wide range of AI, HPC and NVIDIA Omniverse applications.

MGX lets manufacturers build CPU and accelerated servers using a common architecture and modular components. It supports NVIDIA’s full line of GPUs, CPUs, data processing units (DPUs) and network adapters as well as x86 and Arm processors across a variety of air- and liquid-cooled chassis.

QCT and Supermicro will be the first to market with MGX designs appearing in August. Supermicro’s ARS-221GL-NR system announced at COMPUTEX will use the Grace CPU, while QCT’s S74G-2U system, also announced at the event, uses Grace Hopper.

ASRock Rack, ASUS, GIGABYTE and Pegatron will also use MGX to create next-generation accelerated computers.

5G/6G Calls for Grace Hopper

Separately, Huang said NVIDIA is helping shape future 5G and 6G wireless and video communications. A demo showed how AI running on Grace Hopper will transform today’s 2D video calls into more lifelike 3D experiences, providing an amazing sense of presence.

Laying the groundwork for new kinds of services, Huang announced NVIDIA is working with telecom giant SoftBank to build a distributed network of data centers in Japan. It will deliver 5G services and generative AI applications on a common cloud platform.

The data centers will use NVIDIA GH200 Superchips and NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs in modular MGX systems as well as NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet switches to deliver the highly precise timing the 5G protocol requires. The platform will reduce cost by increasing spectral efficiency while reducing energy consumption.

The systems will help SoftBank explore 5G applications in autonomous driving, AI factories, augmented and virtual reality, computer vision and digital twins. Future uses could even include 3D video conferencing and holographic communications.

Turbocharging Cloud Networks

Separately, Huang unveiled NVIDIA Spectrum-X, a networking platform purpose-built to improve the performance and efficiency of Ethernet-based AI clouds. It combines Spectrum-4 Ethernet switches with BlueField-3 DPUs and software to deliver 1.7x gains in AI performance and power efficiency over traditional Ethernet fabrics.

NVIDIA Spectrum-X, Spectrum-4 switches and BlueField-3 DPUs are available now from system makers including Dell Technologies, Lenovo and Supermicro.

Bringing Game Characters to Life

Generative AI impacts how people play, too.

Huang announced NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games, a foundry service developers can use to build and deploy custom AI models for speech, conversation and animation. It will give non-playable characters conversational skills so they can respond to questions with lifelike personalities that evolve.

NVIDIA ACE for Games includes AI foundation models such as NVIDIA Riva to detect and transcribe the player’s speech. The text prompts NVIDIA NeMo to generate customized responses animated with NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face.

Accelerating Gen AI on Windows

Huang described how NVIDIA and Microsoft are collaborating to drive innovation for Windows PCs in the generative AI era.

New and enhanced tools, frameworks and drivers are making it easier for PC developers to develop and deploy AI. For example, the Microsoft Olive toolchain for optimizing and deploying GPU-accelerated AI models and new graphics drivers will boost DirectML performance on Windows PCs with NVIDIA GPUs.

The collaboration will enhance and extend an installed base of 100 million PCs sporting RTX GPUs with Tensor Cores that boost performance of more than 400 AI-accelerated Windows apps and games.

Digitizing the World’s Largest Industries

Generative AI is also spawning new opportunities in the $700 billion digital advertising industry.

For example, WPP, the world’s largest marketing services organization, is working with NVIDIA to build a first-of-its kind generative AI-enabled content engine on Omniverse Cloud.

In a demo, Huang showed how creative teams will connect their 3D design tools such as Adobe Substance 3D, to build digital twins of client products in NVIDIA Omniverse. Then, content from generative AI tools trained on responsibly sourced data and built with NVIDIA Picasso will let them quickly produce virtual sets. WPP clients can then use the complete scene to generate a host of ads, videos and 3D experiences for global markets and users to experience on any web device.

“Today ads are retrieved, but in the future when you engage information much of it will be generated — the computing model has changed,” Huang said.

Factories Forge an AI Future

With an estimated 10 million factories, the $46 trillion manufacturing sector is a rich field for industrial digitalization.

“The world’s largest industries make physical things. Building them digitally first can save billions,” said Huang.

The keynote showed how electronics makers including Foxconn Industrial Internet, Innodisk, Pegatron, Quanta and Wistron are forging digital workflows with NVIDIA technologies to realize the vision of an entirely digital smart factory.

They’re using Omniverse and generative AI APIs to connect their design and manufacturing tools so they can build digital twins of factories. In addition, they use NVIDIA Isaac Sim for simulating and testing robots and NVIDIA Metropolis, a vision AI framework, for automated optical inspection.

The latest component, NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories, can create custom quality-control systems, giving manufacturers a competitive advantage. It’s helping companies develop state-of-the-art AI applications.

AI Speeds Assembly Lines

For example, Pegatron — which makes 300 products worldwide, including laptops and smartphones — is creating virtual factories with Omniverse, Isaac Sim and Metropolis. That lets it try out processes in a simulated environment, saving time and cost.

Pegatron also used the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit to develop intelligent video applications that led to a 10x improvement in throughput.

Foxconn Industrial Internet, a service arm of the world’s largest technology manufacturer, is working with NVIDIA Metropolis partners to automate significant portions of its circuit-board quality-assurance inspection points.

In a video, Huang showed how Techman Robot, a subsidiary of Quanta, tapped NVIDIA Isaac Sim to optimize inspection on the Taiwan-based giant’s manufacturing lines. It’s essentially using simulated robots to train robots how to make better robots.

In addition, Huang announced a new platform to enable the next generation of autonomous mobile robot (AMR) fleets. Isaac AMR helps simulate, deploy and manage fleets of autonomous mobile robots.

A large partner ecosystem — including ADLINK, Aetina, Deloitte, Quantiphi and Siemens — is helping bring all these manufacturing solutions to market, Huang said.

It’s one more example of how NVIDIA is helping companies feel the benefits of generative AI with accelerated computing.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, so I had a lot to tell you,” he said after the two-hour talk to enthusiastic applause.

To learn more, watch the full keynote.

As mobile robot shipments surge to meet the growing demands of industries seeking operational efficiencies, NVIDIA is launching a new platform to enable the next generation of autonomous mobile robot (AMR) fleets.

Isaac AMR brings advanced mapping, autonomy and simulation to mobile robots and will soon be available for early customers, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced during his keynote address at the COMPUTEX technology conference in Taipei.

Isaac AMR is a platform to simulate, validate, deploy, optimize and manage fleets of autonomous mobile robots. It includes edge-to-cloud software services, computing and a set of reference sensors and robot hardware to accelerate development and deployment of AMRs, reducing costs and time to market.

Mobile robot shipments are expected to climb from 251,000 units in 2023 to 1.6 million by 2028, with revenue forecast to jump from $12.6 billion to $64.5 billion in the period, according to ABI Research.

Simplifying the Path to Autonomy

Despite the explosive adoption of robots, the intralogistics industry faces challenges.

Traditionally, software applications for autonomous navigation are often coded from scratch for each robot, making rolling out autonomy across different robots complex. Also, warehouses, factories and fulfillment centers are enormous, frequently running a million square feet or more, making them hard to map for robots and keep updated. And integrating AMRs into existing workflows, fleet management and warehouse management systems can be complicated.

For those working in advanced robotics and seeking to migrate traditional forklifts or automated guided vehicles to fully autonomous mobile robots, Isaac AMR provides the blueprint to accelerate the migration to full autonomy, reducing costs and speeding deployment of state-of-the-art AMRs.

Orin-Based Reference Architecture 

Isaac AMR is built on the foundations of the  NVIDIA Nova Orin reference architecture.

Nova Orin is the brains and eyes of Isaac AMR. It integrates multiple sensors including stereo cameras, fisheye cameras, 2D and 3D lidars with the powerful NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin system-on-module. The reference robot hardware comes with Nova Orin pre-integrated, making it easy for developers to evaluate Isaac AMR in their own environments.

The compute engine of Nova is Orin, which delivers access to some of the most advanced AI and hardware-accelerated algorithms that can be run using 275 tera operations per second (TOPS) of edge computing in real time.

The synchronized and calibrated sensor suite offers sensor diversity and redundancy for real-time 3D perception and mapping. Cloud-native tools for record, upload and replay enable easy debugging, map creation, training and analytics.

Isaac AMR: Mapping, Autonomy, Simulation

Isaac AMR offers a foundation for mapping, autonomy and simulation.

Isaac AMR accelerates mapping and semantic understanding of large environments by tying into DeepMap’s cloud-based service to help accelerate robot mapping of large facilities from weeks to days, offering centimeter-level accuracy without the need for a highly skilled team of technicians. It can generate rich 3D voxel maps, which can be used to create occupancy maps and semantic maps for multiple types of AMRs.

Additionally, Isaac AMR shortens the time to develop and deploy robots in large, highly dynamic and unstructured environments with autonomy that’s enabled by multimodal navigation with cloud-based fleet optimization using NVIDIA cuOpt software.

An accelerated and modular framework enables real-time camera and lidar perception. Planning and control using advanced path planners, behavior planners and use of semantic information make the robot operate autonomously in complex environments. A low-code, no-code interface makes it easy to rapidly develop and customize applications for different scenarios and use cases.

Finally, Isaac AMR simplifies robot operations by tapping into physics-based simulation from Isaac Sim, powered by NVIDIA Omniverse, an open development platform for industrial digitalization. This can bring digital twins to life, so the robot application can be developed, tested and customized for each customer before deploying in the physical world. This significantly reduces the operational cost and complexity of deploying AMRs.

Sign up for early access to Isaac AMR.

How do you help robots build better robots? By simulating even more robots.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang today showcased how leading electronics manufacturer Quanta is using AI-enabled robots to inspect the quality of its products.

In his keynote speech at this week’s COMPUTEX trade show in Taipei, Huang presented on how electronics manufacturers are digitalizing their state-of-the art factories. 

For example, robots from Quanta subsidiary Techman Robot tapped NVIDIA Isaac Sim — a robotics simulation application built on NVIDIA Omniverse — to develop a custom digital twin application to improve inspection on the Taiwan-based electronics provider’s manufacturing line. 

The below demo shows how Techman uses Isaac Sim to optimize the inspection of robots by robots on the manufacturing line. In effect, it’s robots building robots.

Automated optical inspection, or AOI, helps manufacturers more quickly identify defects and deliver high-quality products to their customers around the globe. The NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI framework, now enabled for AOI, is also used to optimize inspection workflows for products ranging from automobiles to circuit boards.

Techman developed AOI with its factory-floor robots by using Isaac Sim to simulate, test and optimize its state-of-the-art collaborative robots, or cobots, while using NVIDIA AI and GPUs for training in the cloud and inference on the robots themselves.

Isaac Sim is built on NVIDIA Omniverse — an open development platform for building and operating industrial metaverse applications.

Unique features of Techman’s robotic AOI solutions include their placement of the inspection camera directly on articulated robotic arms and GPUs integrated in the robot controller.

This allows the bots to inspect areas of products that fixed cameras simply can’t access, as well as use AI at the edge to instantly detect defects.

“The distinctive features of Techman’s robots — compared to other robot brands — lie in their built-in vision system and AI inference engine,” said Scott Huang, chief operations officer at Techman. “NVIDIA RTX GPUs power up their AI performance.”

But programming the movement of these robots can be time consuming.

A developer has to determine the precise arm positions, as well as the most efficient sequence, to capture potentially hundreds of images as quickly as possible.

This can involve several days of effort, exploring tens of thousands of possibilities to determine an optimal solution.

The solution: robot simulation.

Using Omniverse, Techman built a digital twin of the inspection robot — as well as the product to be inspected — in Isaac Sim.

Programming the robot in simulation reduced time spent on the task by over 70%, compared to programming manually on the real robot. Using an accurate 3D model of the product, the application can be developed in the digital twin even before the real product is manufactured, saving valuable time on the production line.

Then, with powerful optimization tools in Isaac Sim, Techman explored a massive number of program options in parallel on NVIDIA GPUs.

The end result was an efficient solution that reduced the cycle time of each inspection by 20%, according to Huang.

Every second saved in inspection time will drop down to the bottom line of Techman’s manufacturing customers.

Gathering and labeling real-world images of defects is costly and time consuming, so Techman turned to synthetic data to improve the quality of inspections. It used the Omniverse Replicator framework to quickly generate high-quality synthetic datasets.

These perfectly labeled images are used to train the AI models in the cloud and dramatically enhance their performance.

And dozens of AI models can be run at the edge — efficiently and with low latency thanks to NVIDIA technology — while inspecting particularly complicated products, some of which take more than 40 models to scrutinize their different aspects.

Learn more about how Isaac Sim on Omniverse, Metropolis and AI are streamlining the optical inspection process across products and industries by joining NVIDIA at COMPUTEX, where the Techman cobots will be on display.

The $46 trillion global electronics manufacturing industry spans more than 10 million factories worldwide, where much is at stake in producing defect-free products. To drive product excellence, leading electronics manufacturers are adopting NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories.

More than 50 manufacturing giants and industrial automation providers — including Foxconn Industrial Internet, Pegatron, Quanta, Siemens and Wistron — are implementing Metropolis for Factories, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced during his keynote address at the COMPUTEX technology conference in Taipei.

NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories is a collection of factory automation workflows that enables industrial technology companies and manufacturers to develop, deploy and manage customized quality-control systems that offer a competitive advantage.

Manufacturers globally spend more than $6 trillion a year in pursuit of quality control, and they apply defect detection on nearly every product line. But manual inspections can’t keep up with the demands.

Many manufacturers have automated optical inspection (AOI) systems that can help, but often these have high false detection rates, requiring labor-intensive and costly secondary manual inspections in an already challenging labor market, reducing their value.

NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories now offers a state-of-the-art AI platform and workflows for the development of incredibly accurate inspection applications such as AOI.

Pegatron Drives AOI With Metropolis for Factories 

Leading manufacturer Pegatron, based in Taipei’s Beitou district, is using NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories on its production lines.

Pegatron manufactures everything from motherboards to smartphones, laptops and game consoles. With a dozen manufacturing facilities handling more than 300 products and more than 5,000 parts per day, Pegatron has a lot of quality control to manage across its product portfolio. Further, frequent product updates require ongoing revisions to its AOI systems.

Pegatron is using the entire Metropolis for Factories workflow to support its printed circuit board (PCB) factories with simulation, robotics and automated production inspection. Metropolis for Factories enables the electronics manufacturing giant to quickly update its defect detection models and achieve 99.8% accuracy on its AOI systems, starting with small datasets.

Pegatron uses NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a robotic simulator, to program robotic arms in simulation and to model the performance of its fleets of mobile robots.

Tapping into NVIDIA Omniverse Replicator provides synthetic data generation to simulate defects, helping build massive training datasets with domain randomization and other techniques.

In Metropolis, NVIDIA TAO Toolkit allows Pegatron to access pretrained models and transfer learning to build its highly accurate defect detection models from its enhanced datasets.

The NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit can be used to develop optimized intelligent video applications that handle multiple video, image and audio streams. Using DeepStream, Pegatron was able to achieve a 10x improvement in throughput.

Moreover, Omniverse enables Pegatron to run digital twins of its inspection equipment, so it can simulate future inspection processes, promising increased efficiencies to its production workflow.

It’s also used by Quanta subsidiary Techman Robot, which taps Isaac Sim to optimize the inspection of robots by robots on their manufacturing line.

Metropolis for Factories is helping manufacturers like Pegatron to increase production line throughput, reduce costs and improve production quality.

Growing Partner Ecosystem Supports Metropolis 

Metropolis for Factories can be deployed from the enterprise industrial edge to the cloud, and a large and growing ecosystem of partners is helping bring it to market.

A host of specialists are joining forces on this effort including sensor makers, application partners, inspection equipment makers and integration partners.

Basler, a leading maker of imaging sensors and systems, has partnered with NVIDIA to help developers build AI-enabled inspection systems faster through tighter integration with the NVIDIA DeepStream SDK.

Quantiphi, a Metropolis partner, is working with one of the world’s largest beverage producers to automate inspections of fully packed pallets with GPU-powered vision AI.

Overview and Advantech — both NVIDIA Metropolis partners — are collaborating to build a real-time AI-based inspection system to support industrial inspection, product counting and assembly verification.

Metropolis partners Siemens and Data Monsters are working together to build industrial inspection systems, bringing together Omniverse Replicator synthetic data generation, NVIDIA TAO training, DeepStream runtime and Siemens’ NVIDIA Jetson-powered industrial personal computers.

Learn more about NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories.

Generative AI is rapidly ushering in a new era of computing for productivity, content creation, gaming and more. Generative AI models and applications — like NVIDIA NeMo and DLSS 3 Frame Generation, Meta LLaMa, ChatGPT, Adobe Firefly and Stable Diffusion — use neural networks to identify patterns and structures within existing data to generate new and original content.

When optimized for GeForce RTX and NVIDIA RTX GPUs, which offer up to 1,400 Tensor TFLOPS for AI inferencing, generative AI models can run up to 5x faster than on competing devices. This is thanks to Tensor Cores — dedicated hardware in RTX GPUs built to accelerate AI calculations — and regular software improvements. Enhancements introduced last week at the Microsoft Build conference doubled performance for generative AI models, such as Stable Diffusion, that take advantage of new DirectML optimizations.

As more AI inferencing happens on local devices, PCs will need powerful yet efficient hardware to support these complex tasks. To meet this need, RTX GPUs will add Max-Q low-power inferencing for AI workloads. The GPU will operate at a fraction of the power for lighter inferencing tasks, while scaling up to unmatched levels of performance for heavy generative AI workloads.

To create new AI applications, developers can now access a complete RTX-accelerated AI development stack running on Windows 11, making it easier to develop, train and deploy advanced AI models. This starts with development and fine-tuning of models with optimized deep learning frameworks available via Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Developers can then move seamlessly to the cloud to train on the same NVIDIA AI stack, which is available from every major cloud service provider. Next, developers can optimize the trained models for fast inferencing with tools like the new Microsoft Olive. And finally, they can deploy their AI-enabled applications and features to an install base of over 100 million RTX PCs and workstations  that have been optimized for AI.

“AI will be the single largest driver of innovation for Windows customers in the coming years,” said Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president of Windows silicon and system integration at Microsoft. “By working in concert with NVIDIA on hardware and software optimizations, we’re equipping developers with a transformative, high-performance, easy-to-deploy experience.”

To date, over 400 RTX AI-accelerated apps and games have been released, with more on the way.

During his keynote address kicking off COMPUTEX 2023, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang introduced a new generative AI to support game development, NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games.

This custom AI model foundry service transforms games by bringing intelligence to non-playable characters through AI-powered natural language interactions. Developers of middleware, tools and games can use ACE for Games to build and deploy customized speech, conversation and animation AI models in their software and games.

Generative AI on RTX, Anywhere

From servers to the cloud to devices, generative AI running on RTX GPUs is everywhere. NVIDIA’s accelerated AI computing is a low-latency, full-stack endeavor. We’ve been optimizing every part of our hardware and software architecture for many years for AI, including fourth-generation Tensor Cores — dedicated AI hardware on RTX GPUs.

Regular driver optimizations ensure peak performance. The most recent NVIDIA driver, combined with Olive-optimized models and updates to DirectML, delivers significant speedups for developers on Windows 11. For example, Stable Diffusion performance is improved by 2x compared to the previous interference times for developers taking advantage of DirectML optimized paths.

And with the latest generation of RTX laptops and mobile workstations built on the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture, users can take generative AI anywhere. Our next-gen mobile platform brings new levels of performance and portability — in form factors as small as 14 inches and as lightweight as about three pounds. Makers like Dell, HP, Lenovo and ASUS are pushing the generative AI era forward, backed by RTX GPUs and Tensor Cores.

“As AI continues to get deployed across industries at an expected annual growth rate of over 37% now through 2030, businesses and consumers will increasingly need the right technology to develop and implement AI, including generative AI. Lenovo is uniquely positioned to empower generative AI spanning from devices to servers to the cloud, having developed products and solutions for AI workloads for years. Our NVIDIA RTX GPU-powered PCs, such as select Lenovo ThinkPad, ThinkStation, ThinkBook, Yoga, Legion and LOQ devices, are enabling the transformative wave of generative AI for better everyday user experiences in saving time, creating content, getting work done, gaming and more.” — Daryl Cromer, vice president and chief technology officer of PCs and Smart Devices at Lenovo

“Generative AI is transformative and a catalyst for future innovation across industries. Together, HP and NVIDIA equip developers with incredible performance, mobility and the reliability needed to run accelerated AI models today, while powering a new era of generative AI.” —  Jim Nottingham, senior vice president and general manager of Z by HP

“Our recent work with NVIDIA on Project Helix centers on making it easier for enterprises to build and deploy trustworthy generative AI on premises. Another step in this historic moment is bringing generative AI to PCs. Think of app developers looking to perfect neural network algorithms while keeping training data and IP under local control. This is what our powerful and scalable Precision workstations with NVIDIA RTX GPUs are designed to do. And as the global leader in workstations, Dell is uniquely positioned to help users securely accelerate AI applications from the edge to the datacenter.” — Ed Ward, president of the client product group at Dell Technologies

“The generative AI era is upon us, requiring immense processing and fully optimized hardware and software. With the NVIDIA AI platform, including NVIDIA Omniverse, which is now preinstalled on many of our products, we are excited to see the AI revolution continue to take shape on ASUS and ROG laptops.” — Galip Fu, director of global consumer marketing at ASUS

Soon, laptops and mobile workstations with RTX GPUs will get the best of both worlds. AI inference-only workloads will be optimized for Tensor Core performance while keeping power consumption of the GPU as low as possible, extending battery life and maintaining a cool, quiet system. The GPU can then dynamically scale up for maximum AI performance when the workload demands it.

Developers can also learn how to optimize their applications end-to-end to take full advantage of GPU-acceleration via the NVIDIA AI for accelerating applications developer site.

“You are running for food, or you are running from becoming food. And often times, you can’t tell which. Either way, run.”

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang today urged graduates of National Taiwan University to run hard to seize the unprecedented opportunities that AI will present, but embrace the inevitable failures along the way.

Whatever you pursue, he told the 10,000 graduates of the island’s premier university, do it with passion and conviction — and stay humble enough to learn the hard lessons that await.

“Whatever it is, run after it like we did. Run. Don’t walk,” Huang said, having swapped his signature black leather jacket for a black graduation robe, with the school’s plum-blossom emblem highlighting a royal blue, white and aqua collar.

“Remember, either you are running for food; or you are running from becoming food. And often times, you can’t tell which. Either way, run.”

Huang, who moved from Taiwan when he was young, recognized his parents in the audience, and shared three stories of initial failures and retreat. He called them instrumental in helping forge NVIDIA’s character during its three-decade journey from a three-person gaming-graphics startup to a global AI leader worth nearly a trillion dollars.

“I was … successful — until I started NVIDIA,” he said. “At NVIDIA, I experienced failures — great big ones. All humiliating and embarrassing. Many nearly doomed us.”

The first involved a key early contract the company won to help Sega build a gaming console. Rapid changes in the industry forced NVIDIA to give up the contract in a near-death brush with bankruptcy, which Sega’s leadership helped avert.

“Confronting our mistake and, with humility, asking for help saved NVIDIA,” he said.

The second was the decision in 2007 to put CUDA into all the company’s GPUs, enabling them to crunch data in addition to handling 3D graphics. It was an expensive, long-term investment that drew much criticism didn’t pay off for years until the chips started being used for machine learning.

“Our market cap hovered just above a billion dollars,” he recalled. “We suffered many years of poor performance. Our shareholders were skeptical of CUDA and preferred we improve profitability.”

The third was the decision in 2010 to charge into the promising mobile-phone market as graphics-rich capabilities were coming into reach. The market quickly commoditized, though, and NVIDIA retreated just as quickly, taking initial heat but opening the door to investing in promising new markets — robotics and self-driving cars.

“Our strategic retreat paid off,” he said. “By leaving the phone market, we opened our minds to invent a new one.”

Huang told grads that of the parallels in terms of boundless promise between the world he entered upon graduating four decades ago, on the cusp of the PC revolution, and the brave new age of AI they are entering today.

“For your journey, take along some of my learnings,” he said. Admit mistakes and ask for help; endure pain and suffering to realize your dreams; and make sacrifices to dedicate yourself to a life of purpose.

Two years after he spoke at a conference detailing his ambitious vision for cooling tomorrow’s data centers, Ali Heydari and his team won a $5 million grant to go build it.

It was the largest of 15 awards in May from the U.S. Department of Energy. The DoE program, called COOLERCHIPS, received more than 100 applications from a who’s who list of computer architects and researchers.

“This is another example of how we’re rearchitecting the data center,” said Ali Heydari, a distinguished engineer at NVIDIA who leads the project and helped deploy more than a million servers in previous roles at Baidu, Twitter and Facebook.

“We celebrated on Slack because the team is all over the U.S.,” said Jeremy Rodriguez, who once built hyperscale liquid-cooling systems and now manages NVIDIA’s data center engineering team.

A Historic Shift

The project is ambitious and comes at a critical moment in the history of computing.

Processors are expected to generate up to an order of magnitude more heat as Moore’s law hits the limits of physics, but the demands on data centers continue to soar.

Soon, today’s air-cooled systems won’t be able to keep up. Current liquid-cooling techniques won’t be able to handle the more than 40 watts per square centimeter researchers expect future silicon in data centers will need to dissipate.

So, Heydari’s group defined an advanced liquid-cooling system.

Their approach promises to cool a data center packed into a mobile container, even when it’s placed in an environment up to 40 degrees Celsius and is drawing 200kW — 25x the power of today’s server racks.

It will cost at least 5% less and run 20% more efficiently than today’s air-cooled approaches. It’s much quieter and has a smaller carbon footprint, too.

“That’s a great achievement for our engineers who are very smart folks,” he said, noting part of their mission is to make people aware of the changes ahead.

A Radical Proposal

The team’s solution combines two technologies never before deployed in tandem.

First, chips will be cooled with cold plates whose coolant evaporates like sweat on the foreheads of hard-working processors, then cools to condense and re-form as liquid. Second, entire servers, with their lower power components, will be encased in hermetically sealed containers and immersed in coolant.

They will use a liquid common in refrigerators and car air conditioners, but not yet used in data centers.

Three Giant Steps

The three-year project sets annual milestones — component tests next year, a partial rack test a year later, and a full system tested and delivered at the end.

Icing the cake, the team will create a full digital twin of the system using NVIDIA Omniverse, an open development platform for building and operating metaverse applications.

The NVIDIA team consists of about a dozen thermal, power, mechanical and systems engineers, some dedicated to creating the digital twin. They have help from seven partners:

• Binghamton and Villanova universities in analysis, testing and simulation
• BOYD Corp. for the cold plates
• Durbin Group for the pumping system
• Honeywell to help select the refrigerant
• Sandia National Laboratory in reliability assessment, and
• Vertiv Corp. in heat rejection

“We’re extending relationships we’ve built for years, and each group brings an array of engineers,” said Heydari.

Of course, it’s hard work, too.

For instance, Mohammed Tradat, a former Binghamton researcher who now heads an NVIDIA data center mechanical engineering group, “had a sleepless night working on the grant application, but it’s a labor of love for all of us,” he said.

Heydari said he never imagined the team would be bringing its ideas to life when he delivered a talk on them in late 2021.

“No other company would allow us to build an organization that could do this kind of work — we’re making history and that’s amazing,” said Rodriguez.

See how digital twins, built in Omniverse, help optimize the design of a data center in the video below.

Picture at top: Gathered recently at NVIDIA headquarters are (from left) Scott Wallace (NVIDIA), Greg Strover (Vertiv), Vivien Lecoustre (DoE), Vladimir Troy (NVIDIA), Peter Debock (COOLERCHIPS program director), Rakesh Radhakrishnan (DoE), Joseph Marsala (Durbin Group), Nigel Gore (Vertiv), and Jeremy Rodriguez, Bahareh Eslami, Manthos Economou, Harold Miyamura and Ali Heydari (all of NVIDIA).

For about six years, AI has been an integral part of the artwork of Dominic Harris, a London-based digital artist who’s about to launch his biggest exhibition to date.

“I use it for things like giving butterflies a natural sense of movement,” said Harris, whose typical canvas is an interactive computer display.

Using a rack of NVIDIA’s latest GPUs in his studio, Harris works with his team of more than 20 designers, developers and other specialists to create artworks like Unseen. It renders a real-time collage of 13,000 butterflies — some fanciful, each unique, but none real. Exhibit-goers can make them flutter or change color with a gesture.

The work attracted experts from natural history museums worldwide. Many were fascinated by the way it helps people appreciate the beauty and fragility of nature by inviting them to interact with creatures not yet discovered or yet to be born.

“AI is a tool in my palette that supports the ways I try to create a poignant human connection,” he said.

An Artist’s View of AI

Harris welcomes the public fascination with generative AI that sprang up in the past year, though it took him by surprise.

“It’s funny that AI in art has become such a huge topic because, even a year ago, if I told someone there’s AI in my art, they would’ve had a blank face,” he said.

Looking forward, AI will assist, not replace, creative people, Harris said.

“With each performance increase from NVIDIA’s products, I’m able to augment what I can express in a way that lets me create increasingly incredible original artworks,” he said.

A Living Stock Exchange

Combining touchscreens, cameras and other sensors, he aims to create connections between his artwork and people who view and interact with them.

For instance, Limitless creates an eight-foot interactive tower made up of gold blocks animated by a live data feed from the London Stock Exchange. Each block represents a company, shining or tarnished, by its current rising or falling valuation. Touching a tile reveals the face of the company’s CEO, a reminder that human beings drive the economy.

It’s one work in Feeding Consciousness, Harris’ largest exhibition to date, opening Thursday, May 25, at London’s Halcyon Gallery.

Booting Up Invitations

“Before the show even opened, it got extended,” he said, showing invitations that went out on small tablets loaded with video previews.

The NVIDIA Jetson platform for edge AI and robotics “features prominently in the event and has become a bit of a workhorse for me in many of my artworks,” he said.

Three years in the making, the new exhibit includes one work that uses 180 displays. It also sports an immersive space created with eight cameras, four laser rangefinders and four 4K video projectors.

“I like building unique canvases to tell stories,” he said.

For example, Endurance depicts polar scenes Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition trekked through when their ship got trapped in the ice pack off Antarctica in 1915. All 28 men survived, and the sunken ship was discovered last year while Harris was working on his piece.

“I was inspired by men who must have felt miniscule before the forces of nature, and the role reversal, 110 years later, now that we know how fragile these environments really are,” he said.

Writing Software at Six

Harris started coding at age six. When his final project in architecture school — an immersive installation with virtual sound — won awards at University College London, it set the stage for his career as a digital artist.

Along the way, “NVIDIA was a name I grew up with, and graphics cards became a part of my palette that I’ve come to lean on more and more — I use a phenomenal amount of processing power rendering some of  my works,” he said.

For example, next month he’ll install Every Wing Has a Silver Lining, a 16-meter-long work that displays 30,000 x 2,000 pixels, created in part with GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs.

“We use the highest-end hardware to achieve an unbelievable level of detail,” he said.

He shares his passion in school programs, giving children a template which they can use to draw butterflies that he later brings to life on a website.

“It’s a way to get them to see and embrace art in the technology they’re growing up with,” he said, comparing it to NVIDIA Canvas, a digital drawing tool his six- and 12-year-old daughters love to use.

The Feeding Consciousness exhibition, previewed in the video below, runs from May 25 to August 13 at London’s Halcyon Gallery.

Keep the NVIDIA and Microsoft party going this GFN Thursday with Grounded, Deathloop and Pentiment  now available to stream for GeForce NOW members this week.

These three Xbox Game Studio titles are part of the dozen additions to the GeForce NOW library.

Triple Threat

NVIDIA and Microsoft’s partnership continues to flourish with this week’s game additions.

Who shrunk the kids? Grounded from Obsidian Entertainment is an exhilarating, cooperative survival-adventure. The world of Grounded is a vast, beautiful and dangerous place — especially when you’ve been shrunken to the size of an ant. Explore, build and thrive together alongside the hordes of giant insects, fighting to survive the perils of a vast and treacherous backyard.

Also from Obsidian is historical narrative-focused Pentiment, the critically acclaimed role-playing game featured on multiple Game of the Year lists in 2022. Step into a living illustrated world inspired by illuminated manuscripts — when Europe is at a crossroads of great religious and political change. Walk in the footsteps of Andreas Maler, a master artist amidst murders, scandals and intrigue in the Bavarian Alps. Impact a changing world and see the consequences of your decisions in this narrative adventure.

DEATHLOOP  is a next-gen first-person shooter from ArkaneLyon, the award-winning studio behind the Dishonored franchise. In DEATHLOOP, two rival assassins are trapped in a time loop on the island of Blackreef, doomed to repeat the same day for eternity. The only chance for escape is to end the cycle by assassinating eight key targets before the day resets. Learn from each cycle, try new approaches and break the loop. The game also includes support for RTX ray tracing for Ultimate and Priority members.

These three Xbox titles join Gears 5 as supported games on GeForce NOW. Members can stream these or more than 1,600 others in the GeForce NOW library.

Priority members can play at up to 1080p 60 frames per second and skip the waiting lines, and Ultimate members can play at up to 4K 120 fps on PC and Mac.

Play across nearly any device — including Chromebooks, mobile devices, SHIELD TVs and supported smart TVs. Learn more about support for Xbox PC games on GeForce NOW.

More Adventures

Middle-earth calls, as The Lord of the Rings: Gollum comes to GeForce NOW. Embark on a captivating interactive experience in this action-adventure game that unfolds parallel to the events of The Fellowship of the Ring. Assume the role of the enigmatic Gollum on a treacherous journey, discovering how he outsmarted the most formidable characters in Middle-earth. Priority and Ultimate members can experience the epic story with support for RTX ray tracing and DLSS technology.

In addition, members can look for the following:

• Blooming Business: Casino (New release on Steam, May 23)
• Plane of Lana (New release on Steam, May 23)
• Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun (New release on Steam, May 23)
• Above Snakes (New release on Steam, May 25)
• Railway Empire 2 (New release on Steam, May 25)
• The Lord of the Rings: Gollum (New release on Steam, May 25)
• Deathloop (Steam)
• Grounded (Steam)
• Lawn Mowing Simulator (Steam)
• Pentiment (Steam)
• The Ascent (Steam)
• Patch Quest (Steam)

The Warhammer Skulls Festival is live today. Check it out for information about upcoming games in the Warhammer franchise, plus discounts on Warhammer titles on Steam and Epic Games Store. Stay up to date on these and other discounts through the GeForce NOW app.

Finally, we’ve got a question for you this week. Let us know what mischief you’d be up to on Twitter or in the comments below.

You wake up one morning smaller than an ant.

What’s the most evil thing you can do?

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) May 24, 2023

Editor’s note: This post is part of our weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology improves creative workflows. We’re also deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB GPU — part of the GeForce RTX 4060 family announced last week — is now available, starting at $399, from top add-in card providers including ASUS, Colorful, Galax, GIGABYTE, INNO3D, MSI, Palit, PNY and ZOTAC, as well as from system integrators and builders worldwide.

GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs come backed by NVIDIA Studio technologies, including hardware acceleration for 3D, video and AI workflows; optimizations for RTX hardware in over 110 of the most popular creative apps; and exclusive Studio apps like Omniverse, Broadcast and Canvas.

Plus, enhancements for NVIDIA Studio-powered creator apps keep coming in. MAGIX VEGAS Pro software for video editing is receiving a major AI overhaul that will boost performance for all GeForce RTX users.

And prepare to be inspired by U.K.-based livestreamer Warwick, equal parts insightful and inspirational, as they share their AI-based workflow powered by a GeForce RTX GPU and the NVIDIA Broadcast app, this week In the NVIDIA Studio.

At the Microsoft Build conference today NVIDIA unveiled new tools for developers that will make it easier and faster to train and deploy advanced AI on Windows 11 PCs with RTX GPUs.

In addition, the Studio team wants to see how creators #SetTheScene, whether for an uncharted virtual world or a small interior diorama of a room.

The latest community challenge is here!

Show us your environment art made with #NVIDIAOmniverse like @TanjaLanggner who used #OpenUSD, @UnrealEngine, #Megascans, and USD Composer to #SetTheScene. pic.twitter.com/AguY1GDeUV

— NVIDIA Omniverse (@nvidiaomniverse) May 11, 2023

Enter the #SetTheScene Studio community challenge. Post original environment art on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, and use the hashtag #SetTheScene for a chance to be featured on the @NVIDIAStudio or @NVIDIAOmniverse social channels.

VEGAS Pro Gets an AI Assist Powered by RTX

NVIDIA Studio collaborated with MAGIX VEGAS Pro to accelerate AI model performance on Windows PCs with extraordinary results.

VEGAS Pro 20 update 3, released this month, increases the speed of AI effects — such as style transfer, AI upscaling and colorization — with NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

Style transfer, for example, uses AI to instantly bring to pieces the style of famous artists such as Picasso or van Gogh with a staggering 219% performance increase over the previous version.

Warwick’s World

As this week’s featured In the NVIDIA Studio artist would say, “Welcome to the channnnnnnel!” Warwick is a U.K.-based content streamer who enjoys coffee, Daft Punk, tabletop role-playing games and cats. Alongside their immense talent and wildly entertaining persona lies an extraordinary superpower: empathy.

Warwick, like the rest of the world, had to find new ways to connect with people during the pandemic. They decided to pursue streaming as a way to build a community. Their vision was to create a channel that provides laughter and joy, escapism during stressful times and a safe haven for love and expression.

“It’s okay not to be okay,” stressed Warwick. “I’ve lived a lot of my life being told I couldn’t feel a certain way, show emotion or let things get me down. I was told that those were weaknesses that I needed to fight, when in reality they’re our truest strengths: being true to ourselves, feeling and being honest with our emotions.”

Warwick finds inspiration in making a positive contribution to other people’s lives. The thousands of subs speak for themselves.

But there are always ways to improve the quality of streams — plus, working and streaming full time can be challenging, as “it can be tough to get all your ideas to completion,” Warwick said.

For maximum efficiency, Warwick deploys their GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, taking advantage of the seventh-generation NVIDIA encoder (NVENC) to independently encode video, which frees up the graphics card to focus on livestreaming.

“I honestly can’t get enough of it!” said the streamer. “Being able to stream with OBS Studio software using NVENC lets me play the games I want at the quality I want, with other programs running to offer quality content to my community.”

Warwick has also experimented with the NVIDIA Broadcast app, which magically transforms dorms, home offices and more into home studios. They said the Eye Contact effect had “near-magical” results.

“Whenever I need to do ad reads, I find it incredible how well Eye Contact works, considering it’s in beta!” said Warwick. “I love the other Broadcast features that are offered for content creators and beyond.”

Warwick will be a panelist on an event hosted by Top Tier Queer (TTQ), an initiative that celebrates queer advocates in the creator space.

Sponsored by NVIDIA Studio and organized by In the NVIDIA Studio artist WATCHOLLIE, the TTQ event in June will serve as an avenue for queer visibility and advocacy, as well as an opportunity to award one participant with prizes, including a GeForce RTX 3090 GPU, to help amplify their voice even further. Apply for the TTQ initiative now.

Meet a Judge for Top Tier Queer!!

What does TTQ mean to you

“It means so much! To be a judge of this competition that aims to uplift and showcase underated and underappreciated LGBTQ+ voices and celebrate them is truly an honour!” @WarwickZero pic.twitter.com/XT9PVCPSy1

— TopTierQueer (@TopTierQueer_) April 11, 2023

Streaming is deeply personal for Warwick. “In my streams and everything I create, I aim to inspire others to know their feelings are valid,” they said. “And because of that, I feel the community that I have really appreciates me and the space that I give them.”

Subscribe to Warwick’s Twitch channel for more content.

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