Posts in category: nVidia AI

AI has seen unprecedented growth — spurring the need for new training and education resources for students and industry professionals.

NVIDIA’s latest on-demand webinar, Essential Training and Tips to Accelerate Your Career in AI, featured a panel discussion with industry experts on fostering career growth and learning in AI and other advanced technologies.

Over 1,800 attendees gained insights on how to kick-start their careers and use NVIDIA’s technologies and resources to accelerate their professional development.

Opportunities in AI

AI’s impact is touching nearly every industry, presenting new career opportunities for professionals of all backgrounds.

Lauren Silveira, a university recruiting program manager at NVIDIA, challenged attendees to take their unique education and experience and apply it in the AI field.

“You don’t have to work directly in AI to impact the industry,” said Silveira. “I knew I wouldn’t be a doctor or engineer — that wasn’t in my career path — but I could create opportunities for those that wanted to pursue those dreams.”

Kevin McFall, a principal instructor for the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute, offered some advice for those looking to navigate a career in AI and advanced technologies but finding themselves overwhelmed or unsure of where to start.

“Don’t try to do it all by yourself,” he said. “Don’t get focused on building everything from scratch — the best skill that you can have is being able to take pieces of code or inspiration from different resources and plug them together to make a whole.”

A main takeaway from the panelists was that students and industry professionals can significantly enhance their capabilities by leveraging tools and resources in addition to their networks.

Every individual can access a variety of free software development kits, community resources and specialized courses in areas like robotics, CUDA and OpenUSD through the NVIDIA Developer Program. Additionally, they can kick off projects with the CUDA code sample library and explore specialized guides such as “A Simple Guide to Deploying Generative AI With NVIDIA NIM”.

Spinning a Network

Staying up to date on the rapidly expanding technology industry involves more than just keeping up with the latest education and certifications.

Sabrina Koumoin, a senior software engineer at NVIDIA, spoke on the importance of networking. She believes people can find like-minded peers and mentors to gain inspiration from by sharing their personal learning journeys or projects on social platforms like LinkedIn.

A self-taught coder, Koumoin also advocates for active engagement and education accessibility. Outside of work, she hosted multiple coding bootcamps for people looking to break into tech.

“It’s a way to show that learning technical skills can be engaging, not intimidating,” she said.

David Ajoku, founder and CEO at Demystifyd and Aware.ai, also emphasized the importance of using LinkedIn to build connections, demonstrate key accomplishments and show passion.

He outlined a three-step strategy to enhance your LinkedIn presence, designed to help you stand out, gain deeper insights into your preferred companies and boldly share your aspirations and interests:

1. Think about a company you’d like to work for and what draws you to it.
2. Research thoroughly, focusing on its main activities, mission and goals.
3. Be bold — create a series of posts informing your network about your career journey and what advancements interest you in the chosen company.

One attendee asked about how AI might evolve over the next decade and what skills professionals should focus on to stay relevant. Louis Stewart, head of strategic initiatives at NVIDIA, replied that crafting a personal narrative and growth journey is just as important as ensuring certifications and skills are up to date.

“Be intentional and purposeful — have an end in mind,” he said. “That’s how you connect with future potential companies and people — it’s a skill you have to develop to stay ahead.”

Deep Dive Into Learning

NVIDIA offers a variety of programs and resources to equip the next generation of AI professionals with the skills and training needed to excel in a career in AI.

NVIDIA’s AI Learning Essentials is designed to give individuals the knowledge, skills and certifications they need to be prepared for the workforce and the fast moving field of AI. It includes free access to self-paced introductory courses and webinars on topics such as generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and CUDA.

The NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) provides a diverse range of resources, including learning materials, self-paced and live trainings, and educator programs spanning AI, accelerated computing and data science, graphics simulation and more. They also offer technical workshops for students currently enrolled in universities.

DLI provides comprehensive training for generative AI, RAG, NVIDIA NIM inference microservices and large language models. Offerings also include certifications for generative AI LLMs and generative AI multimodal that help learners showcase their expertise and stand out from the crowd.

Get started with AI Learning Essentials, the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute and on-demand resources.

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Research published earlier this month in the science journal Nature used NVIDIA-powered supercomputers to validate a pathway toward the commercialization of quantum computing.

The research, led by Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi, focuses on quantum annealing, a method that may one day tackle complex optimization problems that are extraordinarily challenging to conventional computers.

To conduct their research, the team utilized 2 million GPU computing hours at the Leonardo facility (Cineca, in Bologna, Italy), nearly 160,000 GPU computing hours on the Meluxina-GPU cluster, in Luxembourg, and 10,000 GPU hours from the Spanish Supercomputing Network. Additionally, they accessed the Dariah cluster, in Lecce, Italy.

They used these state-of-the-art resources to simulate the behavior of a certain kind of quantum computing system known as a quantum annealer.

Quantum computers fundamentally rethink how information is computed to enable entirely new solutions.

Unlike classical computers, which process information in binary — 0s and 1s — quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits that can allow information to be processed in entirely new ways.

Quantum annealers are a special type of quantum computer that, though not universally useful, may have advantages for solving certain types of optimization problems.

The paper, “The Quantum Transition of the Two-Dimensional Ising Spin Glass,” represents a significant step in understanding the phase transition — a change in the properties of a quantum system — of Ising spin glass, a disordered magnetic material in a two-dimensional plane, a critical problem in computational physics.

The paper addresses the problem of how the properties of magnetic particles arranged in a two-dimensional plane can abruptly change their behavior.

The study also shows how GPU-powered systems play a key role in developing approaches to quantum computing.

GPU-accelerated simulations allow researchers to understand the complex systems’ behavior in developing quantum computers, illuminating the most promising paths forward.

Quantum annealers, like the systems developed by the pioneering quantum computing company D-Wave, operate by methodically decreasing a magnetic field that is applied to a set of magnetically susceptible particles.

When strong enough, the applied field will act to align the magnetic orientation of the particles — similar to how iron filings will uniformly stand to attention near a bar magnet.

If the strength of the field is varied slowly enough, the magnetic particles will arrange themselves to minimize the energy of the final arrangement.

Finding this stable, minimum-energy state is crucial in a particularly complex and disordered magnetic system known as a spin glass since quantum annealers can encode certain kinds of problems into the spin glass’s minimum-energy configuration.

Finding the stable arrangement of the spin glass then solves the problem.

Understanding these systems helps scientists develop better algorithms for solving difficult problems by mimicking how nature deals with complexity and disorder.

That’s crucial for advancing quantum annealing and its applications in solving extremely difficult computational problems that currently have no known efficient solution — problems that are pervasive in fields ranging from logistics to cryptography.

Unlike gate-model quantum computers, which operate by applying a sequence of quantum gates, quantum annealers allow a quantum system to evolve freely in time.

This is not a universal computer — a device capable of performing any computation given sufficient time and resources — but may have advantages for solving particular sets of optimization problems in application areas such as vehicle routing, portfolio optimization and protein folding.

Through extensive simulations performed on NVIDIA GPUs, the researchers learned how key parameters of the spin glasses making up quantum annealers change during their operation, allowing a better understanding of how to use these systems to achieve a quantum speedup on important problems.

Much of the work for this groundbreaking paper was first presented at NVIDIA’s GTC 2024 technology conference. Read the full paper and learn more about NVIDIA’s work in quantum computing.

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Mistral AI and NVIDIA today released a new state-of-the-art language model, Mistral NeMo 12B, that developers can easily customize and deploy for enterprise applications supporting chatbots, multilingual tasks, coding and summarization.

By combining Mistral AI’s expertise in training data with NVIDIA’s optimized hardware and software ecosystem, the Mistral NeMo model offers high performance for diverse applications.

“We are fortunate to collaborate with the NVIDIA team, leveraging their top-tier hardware and software,” said Guillaume Lample, cofounder and chief scientist of Mistral AI. “Together, we have developed a model with unprecedented accuracy, flexibility, high-efficiency and enterprise-grade support and security thanks to NVIDIA AI Enterprise deployment.”

Mistral NeMo was trained on the NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI platform, which offers dedicated, scalable access to the latest NVIDIA architecture.

NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM for accelerated inference performance on large language models and the NVIDIA NeMo development platform for building custom generative AI models were also used to advance and optimize the process.

This collaboration underscores NVIDIA’s commitment to supporting the model-builder ecosystem.

Delivering Unprecedented Accuracy, Flexibility and Efficiency 

Excelling in multi-turn conversations, math, common sense reasoning, world knowledge and coding, this enterprise-grade AI model delivers precise, reliable performance across diverse tasks.

With a 128K context length, Mistral NeMo processes extensive and complex information more coherently and accurately, ensuring contextually relevant outputs.

Released under the Apache 2.0 license, which fosters innovation and supports the broader AI community, Mistral NeMo is a 12-billion-parameter model. Additionally, the model uses the FP8 data format for model inference, which reduces memory size and speeds deployment without any degradation to accuracy.

That means the model learns tasks better and handles diverse scenarios more effectively, making it ideal for enterprise use cases.

Mistral NeMo comes packaged as an NVIDIA NIM inference microservice, offering performance-optimized inference with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM engines.

This containerized format allows for easy deployment anywhere, providing enhanced flexibility for various applications.

As a result, models can be deployed anywhere in minutes, rather than several days.

NIM features enterprise-grade software that’s part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise, with dedicated feature branches, rigorous validation processes, and enterprise-grade security and support.

It includes comprehensive support, direct access to an NVIDIA AI expert and defined service-level agreements, delivering reliable and consistent performance.

The open model license allows enterprises to integrate Mistral NeMo into commercial applications seamlessly.

Designed to fit on the memory of a single NVIDIA L40S, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 or NVIDIA RTX 4500 GPU, the Mistral NeMo NIM offers high efficiency, low compute cost, and enhanced security and privacy.

Advanced Model Development and Customization 

The combined expertise of Mistral AI and NVIDIA engineers has optimized training and inference for Mistral NeMo.

Trained with Mistral AI’s expertise, especially on multilinguality, code and multi-turn content, the model benefits from accelerated training on NVIDIA’s full stack.

It’s designed for optimal performance, utilizing efficient model parallelism techniques, scalability and mixed precision with Megatron-LM.

The model was trained using Megatron-LM, part of NVIDIA NeMo, with 3,072 H100 80GB Tensor Core GPUs on DGX Cloud, composed of NVIDIA AI architecture, including accelerated computing, network fabric and software to increase training efficiency.

Availability and Deployment

With the flexibility to run anywhere — cloud, data center or RTX workstation — Mistral NeMo is ready to revolutionize AI applications across various platforms.

Experience Mistral NeMo as an NVIDIA NIM today via ai.nvidia.com, with a downloadable NIM coming soon.

See notice regarding software product information.

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It’s time for a sweet treat — the GeForce NOW Summer Sale offers high-performance cloud gaming at half off for a limited time.

And starting today, gamers can directly access supported PC games on GeForce NOW via Xbox.com game pages, enabling them to get into their favorite Xbox PC games even faster.

It all comes with nine new games joining the cloud this week.

We Halve a Deal

Take advantage of a special new discount — one-month and six-month GeForce NOW Priority or Ultimate memberships are now 50% off until Aug. 18. It’s perfect for members wanting to level up their gaming experience or those looking to try GeForce NOW for the first time to access and stream an ever-growing library of over 1,900 games with top-notch performance.

Priority members enjoy more benefits over free users, including faster access to gaming servers and gaming sessions of up to six hours. They can also stream beautifully ray-traced graphics across multiple devices with RTX ON for the most immersive experience in supported games.

For those looking for top-notch performance, the Ultimate tier provides members with exclusive access to servers and the ability to stream at up to 4K resolution and 120 frames per second, or up to 240 fps — even without upgraded hardware. Ultimate members get all the same benefits as GeForce RTX 40 series GPU owners, including NVIDIA DLSS 3 for the smoothest frame rates and NVIDIA Reflex for the lowest-latency streaming from the cloud.

Strike while it’s hot — this scorching summer sale ends soon.

Path of the Goddess

Capcom’s latest release, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is a unique Japanese-inspired, single-player Kagura Action Strategy game.

The game takes place on a mountain covered in defilement. During the day, purify the villages and prepare for sundown. During the night, protect the Maiden against the hordes of the Seethe. Repeat the day-and-night cycle until the mountain has been cleansed of defilement and peace has returned to the land.

Walk the path of the goddess in the cloud with extended gaming sessions for Ultimate and Priority members. Ultimate members can also enjoy seeing supernatural and human worlds collide in ultrawide resolutions for an even more immersive experience.

Slay New Games

In Dungeons of Hinterberg from Microbird Games, play as Luisa, a burnt-out law trainee taking a break from her fast-paced corporate life. Explore the beautiful alpine village of Hinterberg armed with just a sword and a tourist guide, and uncover the magic hidden within its dungeons. Master magic, solve puzzles and slay monsters — all from the cloud.

Check out the list of new games this week:

• The Crust (New release on Steam, July 15)
• Gestalt: Steam & Cinder (New release on Steam, July 16)
• Nobody Wants to Die (New release on Steam, July 17)
• Dungeons of Hinterberg (New release on Steam and Xbox, available on PC Game Pass, July 18)
• Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn  (New release on Steam and Xbox, available on PC Game Pass, July 18)
• Norland (New release on Steam, July 18)
• Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess (New release on Steam, July 19)
• Content Warning (Steam)
• Crime Boss: Rockay City (Steam)

What are you planning to play this weekend? Let us know on X or in the comments below.

Come sale away this summer

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) July 17, 2024

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Editor’s note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and showcases new hardware, software, tools and accelerations for RTX PC and workstation users.

Video is everywhere — nearly 80% of internet bandwidth today is used to stream video from content providers and social networks. While screens have become bigger and support higher resolutions, nearly all video is only 1080p quality or lower.

Upscalers can help sharpen streamed video and, powered by AI on the NVIDIA RTX platform, significantly enhance image quality and detail.

What Is an Upscaler?

The larger file size of videos makes it harder to compress and transmit compared to images or text. Platforms like Netflix, Vimeo and YouTube work around this limitation by encoding video — the process of compressing the raw source of a video into a smaller container format.

The encoder first analyzes the video to decide what information it can remove to make it fit a target resolution and frame rate. If the target bitrate is insufficient, the video quality decreases, resulting in a loss of detail and sharpness and the presence of encoding artifacts. The smaller the file, the easier it is to share on the internet — but the worse it looks.

Typically, software on the viewer’s device will upscale the video file to fit the display’s native resolution. However, these upscalers are fairly simplistic, merely multiplying pixels to meet the desired resolution. They can help sharpen the outlines of objects and scenes, but the final video typically carries encoding artifacts and sometimes looks over-sharpened and unnatural.

AI Know a Better Way

The NVIDIA RTX platform uses AI to easily de-artifact and upscale videos.

The process of AI upscaling involves analyzing images and motion vectors to generate new details not present in the original video. Instead of merely multiplying pixels, it recognizes the patterns of the image and enhances them to provide greater detail and video quality.

Images must be first de-artifacted before any processing begins. Artifacts — or unwanted distortions and anomalies that appear in video and image files — occur due to overcompression or data loss during transmission and storage.

NVIDIA AI networks can de-artifact images, helping remove blocky areas sometimes seen in streamed video. Without this first step, AI upscalers might end up enhancing the artifacted image itself instead of the desired content.

Super-Sized Video

Just like putting on a pair of prescription glasses can instantly snap the world into focus, RTX Video Super Resolution, one of NVIDIA’s latest innovations in AI-enhanced video technology, gives users a clearer picture into the world of streamed video.

Available on GeForce RTX 40 and 30 Series GPUs and RTX professional GPUs, it uses AI running on dedicated Tensor Cores to remove block compression artifacts and upscale lower-resolution content up to 4K, matching the user’s native display resolution.

RTX Video Super Resolution can be used to enhance all video watched on browsers. By combining de-artifacting with AI upscaling techniques, it can make even low-bitrate Twitch streams look stunningly clear. RTX Video Super Resolution is also supported in popular video apps like VLC so users can apply the same upscaling process to their offline videos.

Creators can soon use RTX Video Super Resolution in editing apps like Black Magic’s Davinci Resolve, making it easier than ever to upscale lower-quality video files to 4K resolution, as well as convert standard-dynamic range source files into high-dynamic range (HDR).

Say Hi to High-Dynamic Range

RTX Video now also supports AI HDR. HDR video supports a wider range of colors, lending greater detail especially to the darker and lighter areas of images. The problem is that there isn’t that much HDR content online yet.

Enter RTX Video HDR — by simply turning on the feature, the AI network will turn any standard or low-dynamic-range content into HDR, performing the correct tone mapping so the image still looks natural and retains its original colors.

AI Across the Board

RTX Video is just the latest implementation of AI upscaling powered by NVIDIA RTX.

Members of the GeForce NOW cloud streaming service can play their favorite PC games on nearly any device. GeForce RTX servers located all over the world first render the game video content, encode it and then stream it to the player’s local device — just like streaming video from other content providers.

Members on older NVIDIA GPU-powered devices can still use AI-enhanced upscaling to improve gameplay quality. This means they can enjoy the best of both worlds — gameplay rendered on servers powered by RTX 4080-class GPUs in the cloud and AI-enhanced streaming quality. Get more information on enabling AI-enhanced upscaling on GeForce NOW.

The NVIDIA SHIELD TV takes this one step further, processing AI neural networks directly on its NVIDIA Tegra system-on-a-chip to upscale 1080p-quality or lower content from nearly any streaming platform to a display’s native resolution. That means users can improve the video quality of content streamed from Netflix, Prime Video, Max, Disney+ and more at the push of a remote button.

SHIELD TV is currently available for up to $30 off in North America and £30 or 35€ off in Europe as part of Amazon’s Prime Day event running July 16-17. For Prime members in Europe, eligible SHIELD TV purchases also include one month of the GeForce NOW Ultimate membership for free, enabling GeForce RTX 4080-class PC gameplay streamed directly to the living room.

AI has enabled unprecedented improvements in video quality, helping set a new standard in streaming experiences.

Generative AI is transforming gaming, videoconferencing and interactive experiences of all kinds. Make sense of what’s new and what’s next by subscribing to the AI Decoded newsletter.

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Editor’s note: This post is part of our 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 GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.

Wondershare Filmora — a video editing app with AI-powered tools — now supports NVIDIA RTX Video HDR, joining editing software like Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve and Cyberlink PowerDirector.

RTX Video HDR significantly enhances video quality, ensuring the final output is suitable for the best monitors available today.

Livestreaming software OBS Studio and XSplit Broadcaster now support Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting, giving streamers more control over video quality through client-side encoding and automatic configurations. The feature, developed in collaboration between Twitch, OBS and NVIDIA, also paves the way for more advancements, including vertical live video and advanced codecs such as HEVC and AV1.

A summer’s worth of creative app updates are included in the July Studio Driver, ready for download today. Install the NVIDIA app beta — the essential companion for creators and gamers — to keep GeForce RTX PCs up to date with the latest NVIDIA drivers and technology.

Join NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH to learn about the latest breakthroughs in graphics and generative AI, and tune in to a fireside chat featuring NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Lauren Goode, senior writer at WIRED, on Monday, July 29 at 2:30 p.m. MT. Register now.

And this week’s featured In the NVIDIA Studio artist, Kevin Stratvert, shares all about AI-powered content creation in Wondershare Filmora.

(Wonder)share the Beauty of RTX Video

RTX Video HDR analyzes standard dynamic range video and transforms it into HDR10-quality video, expanding the color gamut to produce clearer, more vibrant frames and enhancing the sense of depth for greater immersion.

With RTX Video HDR, Filmora users can create high-quality content that’s ideal for gaming videos, travel vlogs or event filmmaking.

Combining RTX Video HDR with RTX Video Super Resolution — another AI-powered tool that uses trained models to sharpen edges, restore features and remove artifacts in video — further enhances visual quality. RTX Video HDR requires an NVIDIA RTX GPU connected to an HDR10-compatible monitor or TV. For more information, check out the RTX Video FAQ.

Those with a RTX GPU-powered PC can send files to the Filmora desktop app and continue to edit with local RTX acceleration, doubling the speed of the export process with dual encoders on GeForce RTX 4070 Ti or above GPUs.

Learn more about Wondershare Filmora’s AI-powered features.

Maximizing AI Features in Filmora

Kevin Stratvert has the heart of a teacher — he’s always loved to share his technical knowledge and tips with others.

One day, he thought, “Why not make a YouTube video to explain stuff directly to users?” His first big hit was a tutorial on how to get Microsoft Office for free through Office.com. The video garnered millions of views and tons of engagement — and he’s continued creating content ever since.

“The more content I created, the more questions and feedback I got from viewers, sparking this cycle of creativity and connection that I just couldn’t get enough of,” said Stratvert.

Explaining the benefits of AI has been an area of particular interest for Stratvert, especially as it relates to AI-powered features in Wondershare Filmora. In one YouTube video, Filmora Video Editor Tutorial for Beginners, he breaks down the AI effects video editors can use to accelerate their workflows.

Examples include:

• Smart Edit: Edit footage-based transcripts generated automatically, including in multiple languages.
• Smart Cutout: Remove unwanted objects or change the background in seconds.
• Speech-to-Text: Automatically generate compelling descriptions, titles and captions.

“AI has become a crucial part of my creative toolkit, especially for refining details that really make a difference,” said Stratvert. “By handling these technical tasks, AI frees up my time to focus more on creating content, making the whole process smoother and more efficient.”

Stratvert has also been experimenting with NVIDIA ChatRTX, a technology that lets users interact with their local data, installing and configuring various AI models, effectively prompting AI for both text and image outputs using CLIP and more.

NVIDIA Broadcast has been instrumental in giving Stratvert a professional setup for web conferences and livestreams. The app’s features, including background noise removal and virtual background, help maintain a professional appearance on screen. It’s especially useful in home studio settings, where controlling variables in the environment can be challenging.

Stratvert stresses the importance of his GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card in the content creation process.

“With an RTX GPU, I’ve noticed a dramatic improvement in render times and the smoothness of playback, even in demanding scenarios,” he said. “Additionally, the advanced capabilities of RTX GPUs support more intensive tasks like real-time ray tracing and AI-driven editing features, which can open up new creative possibilities in my edits.”

Check out Stratvert’s video tutorials on his website.

Follow NVIDIA Studio on Instagram, X and Facebook. Access tutorials on the Studio YouTube channel and get updates directly in your inbox by subscribing to the Studio newsletter. 

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NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will hold a public fireside chat on Monday, July 29, at the 50th edition of the SIGGRAPH graphics conference in Denver.

The two leaders will discuss the future of AI and simulation and the pivotal role of research at SIGGRAPH, which focuses on the intersection of graphics and technology.

Before the discussion, Huang will also appear in a fireside chat with WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode to discuss AI and graphics for the new computing revolution.

Both conversations will be available live and on replay at NVIDIA.com.

The appearances at the conference, which runs July 28-Aug. 1, highlight SIGGRAPH’s continued role in technological innovation. Nearly 100 exhibitors will showcase how graphics are stepping into the future.

Attendees exploring the SIGGRAPH Innovation Zone will encounter startups at the forefront of computing and graphics while insights from industry leaders like Huang deliver a glimpse into the technological horizon.

Since the conference’s 1974 inception in Boulder, Colorado, SIGGRAPH has been at the forefront of innovation.

It introduced the world to demos such as the “Aspen Movie Map” — a precursor to Google Street View decades ahead of its time — and one of the first screenings of Pixar’s Luxo Jr., which redefined the art of animation.

The conference remains the leading venue for groundbreaking research in computer graphics.

Publications that redefined modern visual culture — including Ed Catmull’s 1974 paper on texture mapping, Turner Whitted’s 1980 paper on ray-tracing techniques, and James T. Kajiya’s 1986 “The Rendering Equation” — first made their debut at SIGGRAPH.

Innovations like these are now spilling out across the world’s industries.

Throughout the Innovation Zone, over a dozen startups are showcasing how they’re bringing advancements rooted in graphics into diverse fields — from robotics and manufacturing to autonomous vehicles and scientific research, including climate science.

Highlights include Tomorrow.io, which leverages NVIDIA Earth-2 to provide precise weather insights and offers early warning systems to help organizations adapt to climate changes.

Looking Glass is pioneering holographic technology that enables 3D content experiences without headsets. The company is using NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs and NVIDIA Maxine technology to enhance real-time audio, video and augmented-reality effects to make this possible.

Manufacturing startup nTop developed a computer-aided design tool using NVIDIA GPU-powered signed distance fields. The tool uses the NVIDIA OptiX rendering engine and a two-way NVIDIA Omniverse LiveLink connector to enable real-time, high-fidelity visualization and collaboration across design and simulation platforms.

Conference attendees can also explore how generative AI — a technology deeply rooted in visual computing — is remaking professional graphics.

On July 31, industry leaders and developers will gather in room 607 at the Colorado Convention Center for Generative AI Day, exploring cutting-edge solutions for visual effects, animation and game development with leaders from Bria AI, Cuebric, Getty Images, Replikant, Shutterstock and others.

The conference’s speaker lineup is equally compelling.

In addition to Huang and Zuckerberg, notable presenters include Dava Newman of MIT Media Lab and Mark Sagar from Soul Machines, who’ll delve into the intersections of bioengineering, design and digital humans.

Finally, as part of SIGGRAPH’s rich legacy, the inaugural Stephen Parker Award will be presented to honor the memory and contributions of Stephen Parker, vice president of professional graphics at NVIDIA. Renowned for his pioneering work in interactive ray tracing and computer graphics, Parker left a legacy that continues to inspire the field.

Join the global technology community in Denver later this month to discover why SIGGRAPH remains at the forefront of demonstrating, predicting and shaping the future of technology.

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NVIDIA is taking an array of advancements in rendering, simulation and generative AI to SIGGRAPH 2024, the premier computer graphics conference, which will take place July 28 – Aug. 1 in Denver.

More than 20 papers from NVIDIA Research introduce innovations advancing synthetic data generators and inverse rendering tools that can help train next-generation models. NVIDIA’s AI research is making simulation better by boosting image quality and unlocking new ways to create 3D representations of real or imagined worlds.

The papers focus on diffusion models for visual generative AI, physics-based simulation and increasingly realistic AI-powered rendering. They include two technical Best Paper Award winners and collaborations with universities across the U.S., Canada, China, Israel and Japan as well as researchers at companies including Adobe and Roblox.

These initiatives will help create tools that developers and businesses can use to generate complex virtual objects, characters and environments. Synthetic data generation can then be harnessed to tell powerful visual stories, aid scientists’ understanding of natural phenomena or assist in simulation-based training of robots and autonomous vehicles.

Diffusion Models Improve Texture Painting, Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion models, a popular tool for transforming text prompts into images, can help artists, designers and other creators rapidly generate visuals for storyboards or production, reducing the time it takes to bring ideas to life.

Two NVIDIA-authored papers are advancing the capabilities of these generative AI models.

ConsiStory, a collaboration between researchers at NVIDIA and Tel Aviv University, makes it easier to generate multiple images with a consistent main character — an essential capability for storytelling use cases such as illustrating a comic strip or developing a storyboard. The researchers’ approach introduces a technique called subject-driven shared attention, which reduces the time it takes to generate consistent imagery from 13 minutes to around 30 seconds.

NVIDIA researchers last year won the Best in Show award at SIGGRAPH’s Real-Time Live event for AI models that turn text or image prompts into custom textured materials. This year, they’re presenting a paper that applies 2D generative diffusion models to interactive texture painting on 3D meshes, enabling artists to paint in real time with complex textures based on any reference image.

Kick-Starting Developments in Physics-Based Simulation

Graphics researchers are narrowing the gap between physical objects and their virtual representations with physics-based simulation — a range of techniques to make digital objects and characters move the same way they would in the real world.

Several NVIDIA Research papers feature breakthroughs in the field, including SuperPADL, a project that tackles the challenge of simulating complex human motions based on text prompts (see video at top).

Using a combination of reinforcement learning and supervised learning, the researchers demonstrated how the SuperPADL framework can be trained to reproduce the motion of more than 5,000 skills — and can run in real time on a consumer-grade NVIDIA GPU.

Another NVIDIA paper features a neural physics method that applies AI to learn how objects — whether represented as a 3D mesh, a NeRF or a solid object generated by a text-to-3D model — would behave as they are moved in an environment.

A paper written in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University researchers develops a new kind of renderer — one that, instead of modeling physical light, can perform thermal analysis, electrostatics and fluid mechanics. Named one of five best papers at SIGGRAPH, the method is easy to parallelize and doesn’t require cumbersome model cleanup, offering new opportunities for speeding up engineering design cycles.

In the example above, the renderer performs a thermal analysis of the Mars Curiosity rover, where keeping temperatures within a specific range is critical to mission success. 

Additional simulation papers introduce a more efficient technique for modeling hair strands and a pipeline that accelerates fluid simulation by 10x.

Raising the Bar for Rendering Realism, Diffraction Simulation

Another set of NVIDIA-authored papers present new techniques to model visible light up to 25x faster and simulate diffraction effects — such as those used in radar simulation for training self-driving cars — up to 1,000x faster.

A paper by NVIDIA and University of Waterloo researchers tackles free-space diffraction, an optical phenomenon where light spreads out or bends around the edges of objects. The team’s method can integrate with path-tracing workflows to increase the efficiency of simulating diffraction in complex scenes, offering up to 1,000x acceleration. Beyond rendering visible light, the model could also be used to simulate the longer wavelengths of radar, sound or radio waves.

Path tracing samples numerous paths — multi-bounce light rays traveling through a scene — to create a photorealistic picture. Two SIGGRAPH papers improve sampling quality for ReSTIR, a path-tracing algorithm first introduced by NVIDIA and Dartmouth College researchers at SIGGRAPH 2020 that has been key to bringing path tracing to games and other real-time rendering products.

One of these papers, a collaboration with the University of Utah, shares a new way to reuse calculated paths that increases effective sample count by up to 25x, significantly boosting image quality. The other improves sample quality by randomly mutating a subset of the light’s path. This helps denoising algorithms perform better, producing fewer visual artifacts in the final render.

Teaching AI to Think in 3D

NVIDIA researchers are also showcasing multipurpose AI tools for 3D representations and design at SIGGRAPH.

One paper introduces fVDB, a GPU-optimized framework for 3D deep learning that matches the scale of the real world. The fVDB framework provides AI infrastructure for the large spatial scale and high resolution of city-scale 3D models and NeRFs, and segmentation and reconstruction of large-scale point clouds.

A Best Technical Paper award winner written in collaboration with Dartmouth College researchers introduces a theory for representing how 3D objects interact with light. The theory unifies a diverse spectrum of appearances into a single model.

And a collaboration with University of Tokyo, University of Toronto and Adobe Research introduces an algorithm that generates smooth, space-filling curves on 3D meshes in real time. While previous methods took hours, this framework runs in seconds and offers users a high degree of control over the output to enable interactive design.

NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH

Learn more about NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH, with special events including a fireside chat between NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Lauren Goode, senior writer at WIRED, on the impact of robotics and AI in industrial digitalization.

NVIDIA researchers will also present OpenUSD Day by NVIDIA, a full-day event showcasing how developers and industry leaders are adopting and evolving OpenUSD to build AI-enabled 3D pipelines.

NVIDIA Research has hundreds of scientists and engineers worldwide, with teams focused on topics including AI, computer graphics, computer vision, self-driving cars and robotics. See more of their latest work.

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Unlock new experiences every GFN Thursday. Whether post-apocalyptic survival adventures, narrative-driven games or vast, open worlds, GeForce NOW always has something fresh for members to explore.

This week, GeForce NOW brings the survival game Once Human from Starry Studio to the cloud, part of three new titles.

Survive the Stardust

Step into a post-apocalyptic world where cosmic energy has transformed humanity in Once Human. As a Meta-Human, survive the contamination and use the powers of Stardust to navigate a new and bizarre open-world universe.

Experience elements of survival, crafting and combat while challenging players to gather resources, build shelters and fend off human and monstrous threats. Uncover the rich lore through interactions with various characters and artifacts scattered throughout the world.

Delve into the truth of Stardust — discover where it came from and what it wants. Play alone or grab a squad to fight, build and explore together. Level up with an Ultimate or Priority membership to stream across devices at higher resolutions and frame rates over free members. Gaming sessions are up to six hours for Priority members and eight hours for Ultimate members, plenty of time to unravel the cosmic mysteries of Once Human.

Happy New Games

Unleash the world’s deadliest feet on a colorful cast of anthropomorphic enemies in Anger Foot from Devolver Digital. Clear out slums, sewers and skyscrapers, grab new weapons, unlock new sneakers and upgrade powers in absurd and wonderful ways. Kick and shoot to get to the exit — and leave behind a smoldering trail of shattered doors, broken bones and crumpled energy drinks.

Check out the list of new games this week:

• Cricket 24 (New release on Xbox and available on PC Game Pass, July 9)
• Once Human (New release on Steam, July 9)
• Anger Foot (New release on Steam, July 11)

What are you planning to play this weekend? Let us know on X or in the comments below.

If you could replay any game as if it were the first time, which game would it be?

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) July 10, 2024

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Enhancing Japan’s AI sovereignty and strengthening its research and development capabilities, Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) will integrate thousands of NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs into its AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure 3.0 supercomputer (ABCI 3.0). The HPE Cray XD system will feature NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking for superior performance and scalability.

ABCI 3.0 is the latest iteration of Japan’s large-scale Open AI Computing Infrastructure designed to advance AI R&D. This collaboration underlines Japan’s commitment to advancing its AI capabilities and fortifying its technological independence.

“In August 2018, we launched ABCI, the world’s first large-scale open AI computing infrastructure,” said AIST Executive Officer Yoshio Tanaka. “Building on our experience over the past several years managing ABCI, we’re now upgrading to ABCI 3.0. In collaboration with NVIDIA we aim to develop ABCI 3.0 into a computing infrastructure that will advance further research and development capabilities for generative AI in Japan.”

“As generative AI prepares to catalyze global change, it’s crucial to rapidly cultivate research and development capabilities within Japan,” said AIST Solutions Co. Producer and Head of ABCI Operations Hirotaka Ogawa. “I’m confident that this major upgrade of ABCI in our collaboration with NVIDIA and HPE will enhance ABCI’s leadership in domestic industry and academia, propelling Japan towards global competitiveness in AI development and serving as the bedrock for future innovation.”

ABCI 3.0: A New Era for Japanese AI Research and Development

ABCI 3.0 is constructed and operated by AIST, its business subsidiary, AIST Solutions, and its system integrator, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

The ABCI 3.0 project follows support from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, known as METI, for strengthening its computing resources through the Economic Security Fund and is part of a broader $1 billion initiative by METI that includes both ABCI efforts and investments in cloud AI computing.

NVIDIA is closely collaborating with METI on research and education following a visit last year by company founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, who met with political and business leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, to discuss the future of AI.

NVIDIA’s Commitment to Japan’s Future

Huang pledged to collaborate on research, particularly in generative AI, robotics and quantum computing, to invest in AI startups and provide product support, training and education on AI.

During his visit, Huang emphasized that “AI factories” — next-generation data centers designed to handle the most computationally intensive AI tasks — are crucial for turning vast amounts of data into intelligence.

“The AI factory will become the bedrock of modern economies across the world,” Huang said during a meeting with the Japanese press in December.

With its ultra-high-density data center and energy-efficient design, ABCI provides a robust infrastructure for developing AI and big data applications.

The system is expected to come online by the end of this year and offer state-of-the-art AI research and development resources. It will be housed in Kashiwa, near Tokyo.

Unmatched Computing Performance and Efficiency

The facility will offer:

• 6 AI exaflops of computing capacity, a measure of AI-specific performance without sparsity
• 410 double-precision petaflops, a measure of general computing capacity
• Each node is connected via the Quantum-2 InfiniBand platform at 200GB/s of bisectional bandwidth.

NVIDIA technology forms the backbone of this initiative, with hundreds of nodes each equipped with 8 NVLlink-connected H200 GPUs providing unprecedented computational performance and efficiency.

NVIDIA H200 is the first GPU to offer over 140 gigabytes (GB) of HBM3e memory at 4.8 terabytes per second (TB/s). The H200’s larger and faster memory accelerates generative AI and LLMs, while advancing scientific computing for HPC workloads with better energy efficiency and lower total cost of ownership.

NVIDIA H200 GPUs are 15X more energy-efficient than ABCI’s previous-generation architecture for AI workloads such as LLM token generation.

The integration of advanced NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand with In-Network computing — where networking devices perform computations on data, offloading the work from the CPU — ensures efficient, high-speed, low-latency communication, crucial for handling intensive AI workloads and vast datasets.

ABCI boasts world-class computing and data processing power, serving as a platform to accelerate joint AI R&D with industries, academia and governments.

METI’s substantial investment is a testament to Japan’s strategic vision to enhance AI development capabilities and accelerate the use of generative AI.

By subsidizing AI supercomputer development, Japan aims to reduce the time and costs of developing next-generation AI technologies, positioning itself as a leader in the global AI landscape.

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