Nvidia announced its Nvidia Omniverse Blueprint, a technology that enables industry software developers to build digital twins with realistic real-time physics.
It enables computer-aided engineering (CAE) customers in aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, energy and other industries create digital twins with real-time interactivity. One example of that is the virtual wind tunnel that car designers can use to simulate wind moving over a simulated car.
Nvidia made the announcements at the SC24 supercomputer event.
Software developers such as Altair, Ansys, Cadence and Siemens can use the reference workflow, which includes Nvidia acceleration libraries, physics-AI frameworks and interactive physically based rendering, to achieve 1,200x faster simulations and real-time visualization. This helps their customers drive down development costs and energy usage while getting to market faster.
“We built Omniverse so that everything can have a digital twin,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, in a statement. “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.”
One of the first applications of the blueprint is computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, a critical step to virtually explore, test and refine the designs of cars, airplanes, ships and many other products. Traditional engineering workflows — from physics simulation to visualization and design optimization — can take weeks or even months to complete.
In an industry first, Nvidia and Luminary Cloud are demonstrating at SC24 a virtual wind tunnel that allows users to simulate and visualize fluid dynamics at real-time, interactive speeds, even when changing the vehicle model inside the tunnel.
Unifying three pillars of Nvidia dev tech
Building a real-time physics digital twin requires two fundamental capabilities: real time physics solver performance and real-time visualization of large-scale datasets.
The Omniverse Blueprint achieves these by bringing together Nvidia CUDA-X libraries to accelerate the solvers, the Nvidia Modulus physics-AI framework to train and deploy models to generate flow fields, and Nvidia Omniverse application programming interfaces for 3D data interoperability and real-time RTX-enabled visualization.
Developers can integrate the blueprint as individual elements or in its entirety into their existing tools.
Ansys is the first customer to adopt the Omniverse Blueprint, applying it to Ansys Fluent fluid simulation software to enable accelerated computational fluid dynamics simulation.
Ansys ran 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. That 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.
“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, CEO of Ansys, in a statement. “Our collaboration is pushing the boundaries of engineering and design across multiple industries.”
Luminary Cloud is also adopting the blueprint. The company’s new simulation AI model, built on Nvidia Modulus, learned the relationships between airflow fields and car geometry based on training data generated from its GPU-accelerated CFD solver.
The model runs simulations orders of magnitude faster than the solver itself, enabling real-time aerodynamic flow simulation that is visualized using Omniverse APIs.
Altair, Beyond Math, Cadence, Hexagon, Neural Concept, Siemens, SimScale and Trane Technologies are also exploring adoption of the Omniverse Blueprint into their own applications.
The Omniverse Blueprint can be run on all leading cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It is also available on Nvidia DGX Cloud.
Rescale, a cloud-based platform that helps organizations accelerate scientific and engineering breakthroughs, is using the Nvidia Omniverse Blueprint to enable organizations to train and deploy custom AI models in just a few clicks.
The Rescale platform automates the full application-to-hardware stack and can be run across any cloud service provider. Organizations can generate training data using any simulation solver; prepare, train and deploy the AI models; run inference predictions; and visualize and optimize models.
Companies interested in learning more about the Nvidia Omniverse Blueprint for real-time computer-aided engineering digital twins can sign up for early access.