At GTC2021, NVIDIA reveals the next universe.
In his keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang outlines the company’s vision for accelerated computing, AI, robotics, Omniverse avatars and even digital twins.
NVIDIA’s annual technology conference, GTC, ran through last week and featured 500+ sessions for more than 250,000 developers, researchers and data scientists registered virtually for the event.
If you want to watch the whole keynote, here it is. Lots of acronyms, but where would science be without a few acronyms.
NVIDIA’s Omniverse is not to be confused with Facebook’s Metaverse. The Omniverse is where the developers and scientists have been researching and setting out the architecture for a working virtual sandbox, for well over a year. Huang expanded on, “how Omniverse is used to simulate digital twins of warehouses, plants and factories, of physical and biological systems, the 5G edge, robots, self-driving cars, and even avatars.”
“You will see Omniverse emerge as a foundational platform for digital twins across all of our different industries. We’re seeing and hearing lots about virtual worlds and things like that,” said Richard Kerris, vice president of Omniverse platform development, in a press briefing. “But really what’s going to bring this all together is the connectivity that brings these worlds to have a consistent foundation, or consistent plumbing to make them all work together. And what’s making that happen is Omniverse, our platform that enhances and extends our existing workflows.”
The development started with three chips, the GPU, CPU and DPU, and systems like DGX, HGX, EGX, RTX and AGX, spanning from the cloud to the edge. NVIDIA has created 150 acceleration libraries for 3 million developers, from graphics and AI to sciences and robotics.
Over the week, NVIDIA introduced 65 new and updated SDKs at GTC2021.
“NVIDIA accelerated computing is a full-stack, data-centre-scale and open platform,” Huang said. He also introduced NVIDIA Quantum-2, “the most advanced networking platform ever built,” and set with BlueField-3 DPU, welcoming cloud-native supercomputing.
Quantum-2 offers the extreme performance, broad accessibility and strong security needed by cloud computing providers and supercomputing centres. Huang ended by announcing NVIDIA will build a digital twin, called E-2, or Earth Two, to simulate and predict climate change.
NVIDIA Modulus, introduced on Tuesday, builds and trains physics-informed machine learning models that can learn and obey the laws of physics.
An upgrade to Triton, an inference server for all workloads, now inferences forest models and does multi-GPU multi-Node inference for large language models.
Three new libraries were also introduced:
ReOpt – for the $10 trillion logistics industry.
cuQuantum – to accelerate quantum computing research.
cuNumeric – to accelerate NumPy for scientists, data scientists and machine learning and AI researchers in the Python community.
“Accelerated computing launched modern AI, and the waves it started are coming to science and the world’s industries,” Huang said.
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