Nvidia and OVX System for Digital Twins

Recall our early use of twin style simulation models.

Nvidia Unveils OVX System Purpose-Built for Industrial Digital Twins

By Jaime Hampton   in Datanami

Tuesday at its GTC developer conference, Nvidia launched a new computing system for industrial digital twins, the Nvidia OVX.

Nvidia OVX was created for the purpose of running digital twin simulations within the Omniverse, Nvidia’s industrial operations metaverse that is “a real-time physically accurate world simulation and 3D design collaboration platform.”  “Just as we have DGX for AI, we now have OVX for Omniverse,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in his GTC keynote.

In fast-paced industries constrained by time, physical space, and computing limitations, digital twin technology is promising to transform operations through advanced designing, modeling, and testing capabilities.

“Physically accurate digital twins are the future of how we design and build,” said Bob Pette, vice president of Professional Visualization at Nvidia. “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.”

Specifications

A first generation Omniverse OVX computing system is comprised of eight Nvidia A40 GPUs, three Nvidia ConnectX-6 Dx 200-Gbps NICs, dual Intel Ice Lake 8362 CPUs, 1TB system memory, and 16TB NVMe storage. The OVX computing system can be scaled from a single pod of eight OVX servers up to a SuperPOD of 32 OVX servers when connected with Spectrum-3 switch fabric. Multiple SuperPODS can also be deployed for larger simulation needs.

Capabilities

“OVX will enable designers, engineers, and planners to build physically accurate digital twins of buildings or create massive, true-to-reality simulated environments with precise time synchronization across physical and virtual worlds,” said Nvidia. With the ever-increasing complexity within industry, the testing and evaluation of intricate systems and processes that often operate simultaneously and autonomously can be challenging or sometimes impossible. Creating a digital twin of these systems, such as those in a factory or warehouse involving autonomous vehicles or robots, allows companies to digitally optimize operations for better efficiency or innovation before actual, real-world deployment of modifications or developments.

In his keynote address, Huang noted that because of the complexity of industrial systems, “the Omniverse software and computer need to be scalable, low latency and support precise time,” and since data centers process data in the lowest possible time, but not in precise time, the company wanted to create a “synchronous data center” with OVX. “Most importantly, the network and computers are synchronized using precision timing protocol and RDMA minimizes packet transfer latency,” Huang said.  .... "