Posts in category: nVidia AI

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.

Principal NVIDIA artist and 3D expert Michael Johnson creates highly detailed art that’s both technically impressive and emotionally resonant. It’s evident in his latest piece, Father-Son Collaboration, which draws on inspiration from the vivid imagination of his son and is highlighted this week In the NVIDIA Studio.

“I love how art can bring joy and great memories to others — great work makes me feel special to be a human and an artist,” said Johnson. “Art can flip people’s perspectives and make them feel something completely different.”

“The story behind this piece is that I simply wanted to inspire my son and teach him how things can be perceived — how people can be inspired by others’ art,” said Johnson, who could tell that his son — a doodler himself — often considered his own artwork not good enough.

“I wanted to show him what I saw in his art and how it inspired me,” Johnson said.

Through this project, Johnson also aimed to demonstrate the NVIDIA Studio-powered workflows of art studios and concept artists across the world.

NVIDIA RTX GPU technology plays a pivotal role in accelerating Johnson’s creativity. “As an artist, I care about quick feedback and stability,” he said. “My NVIDIA A6000 RTX graphics card speeds up the rendering process so I can quickly iterate.”

For Father-Son Collaboration, Johnson first opened Autodesk Maya to model the creature’s basic 3D shapes. His GPU-accelerated viewport enabled fast, interactive 3D modeling.

Next, he imported models into ZBrush for further sculpting, freestyling and details. “After I had my final sculpt down, I took the model into Rizom-Lab IV software to lay out the UVs,” Johnson said. UV mapping is the process of projecting a 3D model’s surface to a 2D image for texture mapping. It makes the model easier to texture and shade later in the creative workflow.

Johnson then used Adobe Substance 3D Painter to apply standard and custom textures and shaders on the character.

“Substance 3D Painter is really great because it displays the final look of the textures without bringing it into an external renderer,” said Johnson.

His GPU unlocked RTX-accelerated light and ambient occlusion baking, optimizing assets in mere seconds.

With the textures complete, Johnson imported his models back into Autodesk Maya for hair, grooming, lighting and rendering. For the hair and fur, the artist used XGen, Autodesk Maya’s built-in instancing tool. Autodesk Maya also offers third-party support of GPU-accelerated renderers such as Chaos V-Ray, OTOY OctaneRender and Maxon Redshift.

“Redshift is great — and having a great GPU makes renders really quick,” Johnson added. Redshift’s RTX-accelerated final-frame rendering with AI-powered OptiX denoising exported files with plenty of time to spare.

Johnson put the final touches on Father-Son Collaboration in Adobe Photoshop. With access to over 30 GPU-accelerated features, such as blur gallery, object selection, perspective warp and more, he applied the background and added minor touch-ups to complete the piece.

The joy, awe and wonderment he’d hoped to invoke in his son came to fruition when Johnson finally shared the piece.

“Art is one of the rare things in life that really has no end goal — as it’s really about the process, rather than the result,” Johnson said. “Every day, you learn something new, grow and see things in different ways.”

Check out Johnson’s portfolio on Instagram.

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Learn about the latest with OpenUSD and Omniverse at SIGGRAPH, running August 6-10. Take advantage of showfloor experiences like hands-on labs, special events and demo booths — and don’t miss NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote address on Tuesday, Aug. 8, at 8 a.m. PT. 

NVIDIA joined Pixar, Adobe, Apple and Autodesk today to found the Alliance for OpenUSD, a major leap toward unlocking the next era of 3D graphics, design and simulation.

The group will standardize and extend OpenUSD, the open-source Universal Scene Description framework that’s the foundation of interoperable 3D applications and projects ranging from visual effects to industrial digital twins.

Several leading companies in the 3D ecosystem already signed on as the alliance’s first general members — Cesium, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, IKEA, SideFX and Unity.

Standardizing OpenUSD will accelerate its adoption, creating a foundational technology that will help today’s 2D internet evolve into a 3D web. Many companies are already working with NVIDIA to pioneer this future.

From Skyscrapers to Sports Cars

OpenUSD is the foundation of NVIDIA Omniverse, a development platform for connecting and building 3D tools and applications. Omniverse is helping companies like Heavy.AI, Kroger and Siemens build and test physically accurate simulations of factories, retail locations, skyscrapers, sports cars and more.

For IKEA, OpenUSD represents “a nonproprietary standard format to author and store 3D content to connect our value chain even closer, and develop home furnishing solutions to a lower price,” Martin Enthed, an innovation manager at IKEA, said in a press release the alliance issued today.

“By joining the alliance, we’re demonstrating our dedication to the advantages that OpenUSD provides our clients when linking with cloud-based platforms, including Nexus, Hexagon’s manufacturing platform, HxDR, Hexagon’s digital reality platform, and NVIDIA Omniverse to build innovative solutions in their industries,” said Burkhard Boeckem, CTO of Hexagon.

The Origins of OpenUSD

Pixar started work on USD in 2012 as a 3D foundation for its feature films, offering interoperability across data and workflows. The company made this powerful, multifaceted technology open source four years later, so anyone can use OpenUSD and contribute to its development.

OpenUSD supports the requirements of building virtual worlds — like geometry, cameras, lights and materials. It also includes features necessary for scaling to large, complex datasets, and it’s tremendously extensible, enabling the technology to be adapted to workflows beyond visual effects.

One unique capability of OpenUSD is its layering system, which lets users collaborate in real time without stepping on each other’s toes. For example, one artist can model a scene while others create the lighting for it.

Forging a Shared Standard

As its first priority, the alliance will develop a specification that describes the core functionality of OpenUSD. That’ll provide a recipe tool builders can implement, encouraging adoption of the open standard across the widest possible array of use cases.

The alliance will operate as part of the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), a branch of the Linux Foundation. The JDF provides a path to turn written specifications into industry standards suitable for adoption by globally respected groups like the International Organization for Standardization, or the ISO.

From OpenUSD to Omniverse

NVIDIA has a deep commitment to OpenUSD and working with ecosystem partners to accelerate the framework’s evolution and adoption across industries.

At last year’s SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA detailed a multiyear roadmap of contributions it’s making to enable OpenUSD use in architecture, engineering, manufacturing and more. An update on these plans will be presented by NVIDIA as part of the alliance at this year’s conference on computer graphics.

Help Build the 3D Future

Collaboration is key to the alliance and evolution of OpenUSD.

To get involved or learn more, attend NVIDIA’s keynote, OpenUSD day, hands-on labs and other showfloor activities at SIGGRAPH, running Aug. 6-10.

The Alliance for OpenUSD also will host a keynote panel session at the Academy Software Foundation’s Open Source Days 2023.

For a deeper dive on OpenUSD:

• Check out our USD resources page.
• Watch a video series on getting started with OpenUSD.
• Take a course on using OpenUSD in 3D workflows.
• And watch a webinar about building applications with NVIDIA Omniverse.

From smart factories to next-generation railway systems, developers and enterprises across the world are racing to fuel industrial digitalization opportunities at every scale.

Key to this is the open-source Universal Scene Description (USD) framework, or OpenUSD, along with metaverse applications powered by AI.

OpenUSD, originally developed by Pixar for large-scale feature film pipelines for animation and visual effects, offers a powerful engine for high-fidelity 3D worlds, as well as an expansive ecosystem for the era of AI and the metaverse. Across automotive, healthcare, manufacturing and other industries, businesses are adopting OpenUSD for various applications.

How Developers Use OpenUSD

Developers can use the extensibility of OpenUSD to integrate the latest AI tools, as well as top digital content-creation solutions, into their custom 3D workflows and applications.

At enterprises like BMW Group, in-house developers are building custom applications to optimize and interact with their digital twin use cases. The automaker developed an application that allows factory planners to collaborate in real time on virtual factories using NVIDIA Omniverse, an OpenUSD development platform for building and connecting 3D tools.

Startups like Move.ai, SmartCow and ipolog are also developing groundbreaking metaverse technologies with OpenUSD. Using USD in Omniverse’s modular development platform allows startups and small businesses to easily launch new tools in the metaverse for larger enterprises to use.

In addition, leading 3D solution providers, including Esri, Bentley Systems and Vectorworks, are connecting their technologies with OpenUSD to enable new capabilities in the metaverse and reach more customers. Building on OpenUSD ensures their applications can be continuously expanded to meet the industrial metaverse’s evolving needs.

“USD helps us provide customers with even more flexibility in the 3D design process,” said Dave Donley, senior director of rendering and research at Vectorworks. “By embracing USD, Vectorworks and its users are poised to lead the charge toward a more collaborative and innovative future in industries such as architecture, landscape design and entertainment.”

Why Developers Use OpenUSD

Linear and siloed workflows used to be the norm in 3D content creation. Today, enterprises must integrate their diverse, distributed, highly skilled teams and expand their offerings to remain competitive — most notably in generative AI.

Fluid design collaboration is critical for this, as is the ability for developers to work in open, modular and extensible frameworks. As the pace of AI and metaverse innovation increases, businesses attempting to build new features and capabilities in closed environments are likely to lag behind.

The 3D worlds of the metaverse — which are ushering in a new era of design, simulation and AI advancements — require a common framework to enable scalability and interconnection. As with the 2D web, the success of the metaverse will depend on its interoperability as governed by open standards and protocols.

OpenUSD is well-suited for diverse metaverse applications due to its extensibility and ability to support a wide variety of properties for defining and rendering objects. More than just a file format, the interchange framework connects a robust ecosystem of creative and developer tools.

Cesium, a platform for 3D geospatial workflows, uses USD to enable enterprises building industrial metaverse applications in construction, robotics, simulation and digital twins for climate change.

“Leveraging the interoperability of USD with 3D Tiles and glTF, we create additional workflows, like importing content from Bentley LumenRT, Trimble Sketchup, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk 3ds Max and Esri ArcGIS CityEngine into NVIDIA Omniverse in precise 3D geospatial context,” said Shehzan Mohammed, director of 3D engineering and ecosystems at Cesium.

3D tools interoperate seamlessly with OpenUSD, allowing users to work efficiently across various tools and pipelines. USD’s efficient referencing and layering allows teams to non-destructively edit projects in real time and preserve all source content, enabling iterative, collaborative workflows. Designed to handle large-scale scenes with millions of assets and complex datasets, OpenUSD is ideal for developers building applications to support virtual worlds.

Learn more about the unique capabilities of USD in the video below, as well as in the article, “What You Need to Know About Universal Scene Description.”

Omniverse: The Platform for Building With OpenUSD

NVIDIA Omniverse interconnects diverse 3D tools and datasets with OpenUSD to unlock new possibilities for large-scale, physically accurate virtual worlds and industrial digitalization applications.

Built for developers by developers, Omniverse is open and highly modular. Omniverse Code and Kit enable developers to build advanced, real-time simulation solutions for industrial digitalization and perception AI. They can use all of the platform’s key components, such as Omniverse Nucleus and RTX Renderer, and core technologies to develop solutions designed for their customer needs.

People of all experience levels can build with OpenUSD on Omniverse. Beginners can develop tools with little to no code using existing platform extensions. Experienced developers can use templates or build from scratch with Python or C++ to produce their own powerful apps and extensions — as well as combine them with existing ones to create tools customized for their needs. In addition, visual programming tools like OmniGraph make it easy to set up and perform advanced procedural tasks with just a few clicks.

For example, a warehouse simulation tool can be developed by combining extensions for building layout, warehouse objects, smart object placement and user interfaces that can be fine-tuned for specific needs.

Plus, Omniverse foundation applications like USD Composer and USD Presenter are modular, so users can work with just the functionality they need, and add their own code or extensions to customize apps for different workflows. Developers can easily access and tap into the Python source code of Omniverse extensions in Omniverse Kit.

See What’s Next for OpenUSD

Learn about the latest advancements in design, simulation and AI by joining NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics conference running Aug. 6-10. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote address on Tuesday, Aug. 8, at 8 a.m. PT.

Join NVIDIA for OpenUSD day at SIGGRAPH on Wednesday, Aug. 9, starting at 9 a.m. PT, for a full day of presentations about the framework’s latest developments. NVIDIA will also present award-winning research on rendering and generative AI, as well as host various sessions and hands-on labs for attendees to experience the latest developments in OpenUSD, graphics and more.

Get started with NVIDIA Omniverse by downloading the standard license free, or learn how Omniverse Enterprise can connect your team. Developers can check out these Omniverse resources to begin building on the platform. 

Stay up to date on the platform by subscribing to the newsletter and following NVIDIA Omniverse on Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Threads and Twitter. For more, check out our forums, Discord server, Twitch and YouTube channels.

AI is improving ways to power the world by tapping the sun and the wind, along with cutting-edge technologies.

The latest episode in the I AM AI video series showcases how artificial intelligence can help optimize solar and wind farms, simulate climate and weather, enhance power grid reliability and resilience, advance carbon capture and power fusion breakthroughs.

It’s all enabled by NVIDIA and its energy-conscious partners, as they use and develop technology breakthroughs for a cleaner, safer, more sustainable future.

Homes and businesses need access to reliable, affordable fuel and electricity to power day-to-day activities.

Renewable energy sources — such as sunlight, wind and water — are scaling in deployments and available capacity. But they also burden legacy power grids built for traditional one-way power flow: from generation plants through transmission and distribution lines to end customers.

The latest advancements in AI and accelerated computing enable energy companies and utilities to balance power supply and demand in real time and manage distributed energy resources, all while lowering monthly bills to consumers.

The enterprises and startups featured in the new I AM AI video, and below, are using such innovations for a variety of clean energy use cases.

Power-Generation Site Optimization

Companies are turning to AI to improve maintenance of renewable power-generation sites.

For example, reality capture platform DroneDeploy is using AI to evaluate solar farm layouts, maximize energy generated per site and automatically monitor the health of solar panels and other equipment in the field.

Renewable energy company Siemens Gamesa is working with NVIDIA to apply AI surrogate models to optimize its offshore wind farms to output maximum power at minimal cost. Together, the companies are exploring neural super resolution powered by the NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA Modulus platforms to accelerate high-resolution wake simulation by 4,000x compared with traditional methods–from 40 days to just 15 minutes.

Italy-based THE EDGE COMPANY, a member of the NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI partner ecosystem, is tracking endangered birds near offshore wind farms to provide operators with real-time suggestions that can help prevent collisions and protect the at-risk species.

Grid Infrastructure Maintenance

Energy grids also benefit from AI, which can help keep their infrastructure safe and efficient.

NVIDIA Metropolis partner Noteworthy AI deployed smart cameras powered by the NVIDIA Jetson platform for edge AI and robotics on Ohio-based utility FirstEnergy’s field trucks. Along with AI-enhanced computer vision, the cameras automate manual inspections of millions of power lines, poles and mounted devices.

Orbital Sidekick, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups, has used hyperspectral imagery and edge AI to detect hundreds of suspected gas and hydrocarbon leaks across the globe. This protects worker health and safety while preventing costly accidents.

And Sweden-based startup Eneryield is using AI to detect signal anomalies in undersea cables, predict equipment failures to avoid costly repairs and enhance reliability of generated power.

Climate and Weather Simulation

AI and digital twins are unleashing a new wave of climate research, offering accurate, physics-informed weather modeling, high-resolution simulations of Earth and more.

NVIDIA Inception member Open Climate Fix built transformer-based AI models trained on terabytes of satellite data. Through granular, near-term forecasts of sunny and cloudy conditions over the U.K.’s solar panels, the nonprofit product lab has improved predictions of solar-energy generation by 3x. This reduces electricity produced using fossil fuels and helps decarbonize the country’s grid.

Plus, a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and NVIDIA developed a neural operator architecture called Nested FNO to simulate pressure levels during carbon storage in a fraction of a second while doubling accuracy on certain tasks. This can help industries decarbonize and achieve emission-reduction goals.

And Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory demonstrated the first successful application of nuclear fusion — considered the holy grail of clean energy — and used AI to simulate experimental results.

Learn more about AI for autonomous operations and grid modernization in energy.

Get ready for Gunfire Games and Gearbox Publishing’s highly anticipated Remnant II, available for members to stream on GeForce NOW at launch. It leads eight new games coming to the cloud gaming platform.

Ultimate and Priority members, make sure to grab the Guild Wars 2 rewards, available now through Thursday, Aug. 31. Visit the GeForce NOW Rewards portal and opt in to rewards.

Strange New Worlds

Kick off the weekend with one of the hottest new games in the cloud. Remnant II from Gunfire Games and Gearbox Publishing, sequel to the hit game Remnant: From the Ashes, is newly launched in the cloud for members to stream.

Go head to head against new deadly creatures and god-like bosses while exploring terrifying new worlds with different types of creatures, weapons and items. With various stories woven throughout, each playthrough will be different from the last, making each experience unique for endless replayability.

Find secrets and unlock different Archetypes, each with their own special set of abilities. Members can brave it alone or team up with buddies to explore the depths of the unknown and stop an evil from destroying reality itself. Just remember — friendly fire is on, so pick your squad wisely.

Upgrade to an Ultimate membership to play Remnant II and more than 1,600 titles at RTX 4080 quality, with support for 4K 120 frames per second gameplay and ultrawide resolutions. Ultimate and Priority members can also experience higher frame rates with DLSS technology for AI-powered graphics on their RTX-powered cloud gaming rigs.

Reward Yourself

Ultimate and Priority members can now grab their free, exclusive rewards for Guild Wars 2, featuring the “Always Prepared” and “Booster” bundles, available through the end of August.

The “Always Prepared” bundle includes ten Transmutation Charges to change character appearance, a Revive Orb that returns a player to 50% health at their current location and a top hat to add style to the character. On top of that, the “Booster” bundle includes an Item Booster, Karma Booster, Experience Booster, a 10-Slot Bag and a Black Lion Miniature Claim Ticket, which can be exchanged in game for a mini-pet of choice.

Visit the GeForce NOW Rewards portal to update the settings to receive special offers and in-game goodies. Better hurry — these rewards are available for a limited time on a first-come, first-served basis.

Grab them in time for the fourth expansion of Guild Wars 2, coming to GeForce NOW at launch on Tuesday, Aug. 22. The “Secrets of the Obscure” paid expansion includes a new storyline, powerful combat options, new mount abilities and more.

Racing Into the Weekend

Remnant II is one of the eight games available this week on GeForce NOW. Check out the complete list of new games:

• Remnant II (New release on Steam, July 25)
• Let’s School (New release on Steam, July 26)
• Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival (New release on Steam, July 27)
• MotoGP23 (Steam)
• OCTOPATH TRAVELER (Epic Games Store)
• Pro Cycling Manager 2023 (Steam)
• Riders Republic (Steam)
• Starship Troopers: Extermination (Steam)

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

It’s up to you to save humanity from the Root. Which Archetype are you choosing:

Challenger
Medic
Gunslinger
Handler
Hunter

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) July 26, 2023

AWS users can now access the leading performance demonstrated in industry benchmarks of AI training and inference.

The cloud giant officially switched on a new Amazon EC2 P5 instance powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. The service lets users scale generative AI, high performance computing (HPC) and other applications with a click from a browser.

The news comes in the wake of AI’s iPhone moment. Developers and researchers are using large language models (LLMs) to uncover new applications for AI almost daily. Bringing these new use cases to market requires the efficiency of accelerated computing.

The NVIDIA H100 GPU delivers supercomputing-class performance through architectural innovations including fourth-generation Tensor Cores, a new Transformer Engine for accelerating LLMs and the latest NVLink technology that lets GPUs talk to each other at 900GB/sec.

Scaling With P5 Instances

Amazon EC2 P5 instances are ideal for training and running inference for increasingly complex LLMs and computer vision models. These neural networks drive the most demanding and compute-intensive generative AI applications, including question answering, code generation, video and image generation, speech recognition and more.

P5 instances can be deployed in hyperscale clusters, called EC2 UltraClusters, made up of high-performance compute, networking and storage in the cloud. Each EC2 UltraCluster is a powerful supercomputer, enabling customers to run their most complex AI training and distributed HPC workloads across multiple systems.

So customers can run at scale applications that require high levels of communications between compute nodes, the P5 instance sports petabit-scale non-blocking networks, powered by AWS EFA, a 3,200 Gbps network interface for Amazon EC2 instances.

With P5 instances, machine learning applications can use the NVIDIA Collective Communications Library to employ as many as 20,000 H100 GPUs.

NVIDIA AI Enterprise helps users make the most of P5 instancesoptimize P5 instances. It’s a full-stack suite of software that includes more than 100 frameworks, pretrained models, AI workflows and tools to tune AI infrastructure.

Designed to streamline the development and deployment of AI applications, NVIDIA AI Enterprise addresses the complexities of building and maintaining a high-performance, secure, cloud-native AI software platform. Available in the AWS Marketplace, it offers continuous security monitoring, regular and timely patching of common vulnerabilities and exposures, API stability, and enterprise support as well as access to NVIDIA AI experts.

What Customers Are Saying

NVIDIA and AWS have collaborated for more than a dozen years to bring GPU acceleration to the cloud. The new P5 instances, the latest example of that collaboration, represents a major step forward to deliver the cutting-edge performance that enables developers to invent the next generation of AI.

Here are some examples of what customers are already saying:

Anthropic builds reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems that will have many opportunities to create value commercially and for public benefit.

“While the large, general AI systems of today can have significant benefits, they can also be unpredictable, unreliable and opaque, so our goal is to make progress on these issues and deploy systems that people find useful,” said Tom Brown, co-founder of Anthropic. “We expect P5 instances to deliver substantial price-performance benefits over P4d instances, and they’ll be available at the massive scale required for building next-generation LLMs and related products.”

Cohere, a leading pioneer in language AI, empowers every developer and enterprise to build products with world-leading natural language processing (NLP) technology while keeping their data private and secure.

“Cohere leads the charge in helping every enterprise harness the power of language AI to explore, generate, search for and act upon information in a natural and intuitive manner, deploying across multiple cloud platforms in the data environment that works best for each customer,” said Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere. “NVIDIA H100-powered Amazon EC2 P5 instances will unleash the ability of businesses to create, grow and scale faster with its computing power combined with Cohere’s state-of-the-art LLM and generative AI capabilities.”

For its part, Hugging Face is on a mission to democratize good machine learning.

“As the fastest growing open-source community for machine learning, we now provide over 150,000 pretrained models and 25,000 datasets on our platform for NLP, computer vision, biology, reinforcement learning and more,” said Julien Chaumond, chief technology officer and co-founder of Hugging Face. “We’re looking forward to using Amazon EC2 P5 instances via Amazon SageMaker at scale in UltraClusters with EFA to accelerate the delivery of new foundation AI models for everyone.”

Today, more than 450 million people around the world use Pinterest as a visual inspiration platform to shop for products personalized to their taste, find ideas and discover inspiring creators.

“We use deep learning extensively across our platform for use cases such as labeling and categorizing billions of photos that are uploaded to our platform, and visual search that provides our users the ability to go from inspiration to action,” said David Chaiken, chief architect at Pinterest. “We’re looking forward to using Amazon EC2 P5 instances featuring NVIDIA H100 GPUs, AWS EFA and UltraClusters to accelerate our product development and bring new empathetic AI-based experiences to our customers.”

Learn more about new AWS P5 instances powered by NVIDIA H100.

The world increasingly runs on code.

Accelerating the work of those who create that code will boost their productivity — and that’s just what AI startup Codeium, a member of NVIDIA’s Inception program for startups, aims to do.

On the latest episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz interviewed Codeium founder and CEO Varun Mohan and Jeff Wang, the company’s head of business, about the company’s business, about how AI is transforming software.

Codeium’s AI-powered code acceleration toolkit boasts three core features: autocomplete, chat and search.

Autocomplete intelligently suggests code segments, saving developers time by minimizing the need for writing boilerplate or unit tests.

At the same time the chat function empowers developers to rework or even create code with natural language queries, enhancing their coding efficiency while providing searchable context on the entire code base.

Noah spoke with Mohan and Wang about the future of software development with AI, and the continued, essential role of humans in the process.

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NVIDIA DGX Cloud — which delivers tools that can turn nearly any company into an AI company —  is now broadly available, with thousands of NVIDIA GPUs online on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as well as NVIDIA infrastructure located in the U.S. and U.K.

Unveiled at NVIDIA’s GTC conference in March, DGX Cloud is an AI supercomputing service that gives enterprises immediate access to the infrastructure and software needed to train advanced models for generative AI and other groundbreaking applications.

“Generative AI has made the rapid adoption of AI a business imperative for leading companies in every industry, driving many enterprises to seek more accelerated computing infrastructure,” said Pat Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Generative AI could add more than $4 trillion to the economy annually, turning proprietary business knowledge across a vast swath of the world’s industries into next-generation AI applications, according to recent estimates by global management consultancy McKinsey.

Industry Pioneers Transforming Business With Generative AI

Nearly every industry can benefit from generative AI, with early pioneers already leading transformative change across their markets.

Healthcare companies use DGX Cloud to train protein models to speed drug discovery and clinical reporting with natural language processing.

Financial service providers use DGX Cloud to forecast trends, optimize portfolios, build recommender systems and develop intelligent generative AI chatbots.

Insurance companies are building models to automate claims processing.

Software companies are using it to develop AI-powered features and applications.

And others are using DGX Cloud to build AI factories and digital twins of valuable assets.

Dedicated AI Supercomputing With Immediate Availability

DGX Cloud instances provide dedicated infrastructure enterprises rent on a monthly basis, ensuring customers can quickly and easily develop large, multi-node training workloads without having to wait for accelerated computing resources that are often in high demand.

“The availability of NVIDIA DGX Cloud provides a new pool of AI supercomputing resources, with nearly instantaneous access,” Moorhead said.

This simple approach to AI supercomputing removes the complexity of acquiring, deploying and managing on-premises infrastructure. Providing NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputing paired with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, DGX Cloud makes it possible for businesses everywhere to access their own AI supercomputer using a web browser.

NVIDIA AI Supercomputing and Software in a Browser

Each instance of DGX Cloud features eight NVIDIA 80GB Tensor Core GPUs for 640GB of GPU memory per node. A high-performance, low-latency fabric ensures workloads can scale across clusters of interconnected systems, allowing multiple instances to act as one massive GPU. High-performance storage is integrated into DGX Cloud to provide a complete solution.

Enterprises manage and monitor DGX Cloud training workloads using NVIDIA Base Command Platform software. The platform provides a seamless user experience across DGX Cloud and on-premises NVIDIA DGX supercomputers, so enterprises can combine resources when needed.

And DGX Cloud includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise, the software layer of the NVIDIA AI platform, which provides over 100 end-to-end AI frameworks and pretrained models to accelerate data science pipelines and streamline the development and deployment of production AI.

Learn more about how to get started with DGX Cloud.

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.

We’re gonna need a bigger boat this week In the NVIDIA Studio as Alessandro Mastronardi, senior artist and programmer at BBC Studios, shares heart-stopping shark videos and renders.

The shark-themed series was conceived during the artist’s recent impromptu trip to Iceland, where he saw a huge basking shark up close. “I was eager to know all about its anatomy, the way it moves and feeds,” said Mastronardi.

After deep-diving on the sharks — including great whites, hammerheads and the Elasmobranchii subclass of rays and the like — he was ready to create. Learn more about his creative journey below — there’s no-fin to lose.

His incredible visuals — alongside extraordinary shark-themed artwork from creators Maggie Molloy and Hypertaf — are featured below in the latest Studio Standout video, which spotlights incredible artists and their work.

Plus, the NVIDIA Studio #StartToFinish community challenge runs through the end of August. Use the hashtag to submit a screenshot of a favorite project featuring its beginning and ending stages for a chance to be featured on the @NVIDIAStudio and @NVIDIAOmniverse social channels.

Jaw-some Creativity

Mastronardi, based in Florence, Italy, works to bring the awe-inspiring beauty of mother nature to the masses.

“The satisfaction of studying nature in all its forms — then transforming that information and reference material into art and content used in several productions and scopes — has been my greatest pride and joy,” he said.

He starts the process by sketching ideas and concepts on paper. “This is something I’ve done since my first years, as it helps to have a clear vision of what I want to achieve,” said Mastronardi.

“Simply put, GeForce RTX GPUs are the most reliable, highest-performing, advanced graphics cards that any 3D professional can use.” — Alessandro Mastronardi

Next, Mastronardi uses ZBrush to model all of his characters. “I like to define a base shape, carefully tune proportions and anatomy, and add detail and resolution until I have a high-polygon, fully detailed, featured character that’s finely sculpted and textured,” he said. “This stage isn’t complete until I’m fully satisfied with how the character looks from every angle, and it has its own personality, so to speak.”

The artist exports characters to Blender to retopologize the high-polygon mesh into low-poly, highly optimized characters. “The key is to reproject the highest possible level of detail onto the character, so that all the details will be maintained.”

Next, Mastronardi rigs the character and sets up a skeleton, configuring all digital bones and inverse kinematics, which determine the motion of objects in the scene.

Here, Mastronardi’s PC — equipped with two GeForce RTX 3090 Ti 24GB GPUs — does the heavy lifting. Blender Cycles RTX-accelerated AI-powered OptiX ray tracing in the viewport ensures interactive, photorealistic rendering for modeling and animation.

This rigorous process delivers lifelike animations. “A lot of care has to go into the control-rig stage,” said Mastronardi. “All controls must allow for plausible and realistic deformations, with proper anatomy limits and characteristics, so that the character’s movement will look and feel realistic.”

Also using Blender, the artist sets up shaders and materials, and conducts test renders to evaluate how the characters look in different poses. When satisfied, Mastronardi prepares promotional images — built in an environment that matches the characters — and assembles a scene with added effects and props.

Often, Mastronardi inspects his models with NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting and building custom 3D tools and applications with Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). “Omniverse is my preferred platform to inspect scenes very quickly,” he said. “I like how agile and effective the interface is, as well as the quality it can deliver.”

Mastronardi exports final files using RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing in Blender Cycles for the fastest final frame render. “I love the Cycles render engine, all its features, and the quality and speed that it’s able to deliver,” he added.

Mastronardi plans to use the NVIDIA Broadcast app — from the NVIDIA Studio suite of AI-powered tools — for a new series of 3D art lectures on wildlife, coming soon. Check out Mastronardi’s animal-themed portfolio on ArtStation.

To other artists, Mastronardi would say, “Discard and forget about naysayers, those who tell you ‘No, it can’t be done.’” He added that “growing up, this was a lesson I taught myself: to believe in my own skills, and not to let negativity affect my work or vision to become a wildlife 3D artist.”

There’s some-fin special about those words.

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Learn about the latest with OpenUSD and Omniverse at SIGGRAPH, running August 6-10. Take advantage of showfloor experiences like hands-on labs, special events and demo booths — and don’t miss NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s  keynote address on Tuesday, Aug. 8, at 8 a.m. PT. 

It’s a party this GFN Thursday with several newly launched titles streaming on GeForce NOW. Revel in gaming goodness with Xenonauts 2, Viewfinder and Techtonica, among the four new games joining the cloud this week.

Portal fans, stay tuned — the Portal: Prelude RTX mod will be streaming on GeForce NOW to members soon.

Plus, find out how members can score an upcoming Guild Wars 2 premium reward.

Get ‘Em While They’re Hot!

Choose from over 1,600 games in the GeForce NOW library, starting off with the titles making their cloud debut. Be among the first to experience Xenonauts 2, Viewfinder and Techtonica from a high-performance GeForce RTX gaming rig in the cloud, without worrying about download times or system specs.

Take on a different perspective in Viewfinder, the new single-player game from Thunderful Publishing. Gamers can challenge perception, redefine reality and reshape the world around them with an instant camera. Capture pictures and bring them to life by placing them into the scene in this mind-bending reality adventure.

Those looking for something out of this world can check out Fire Hose Games’ Techtonica, set in a strangely beautiful, bioluminescent, mysterious subsurface alien universe. Play solo or with a buddy to build factories, gather resources, research new technologies and uncover long-forgotten secrets.

Fans of the Xenonauts series can look forward to the second entry in the franchise from Hooded Horse. In Xenonauts 2, work as the head of a multinational military organization tasked with eliminating an extraterrestrial threat. Play from the shadows to seek out and engage a growing alien presence.

Catch these titles fresh out of the oven and upgrade to a premium membership for faster access over free members.

Exclusive GeForce NOW Rewards

Starting next week, Ultimate and Priority members get an exclusive reward for the hit MMORPG Guild Wars 2. The “Always Prepared” and “Booster” bundles will bring premium members a combo of helpful tools, cosmetic items, a mini pet and more.

Upgrade to an Ultimate or Priority membership today, and visit the GeForce NOW Rewards portal to update the settings to receive special offers and in-game goodies. Better hurry — these rewards are available for a limited time on a first-come, first-served basis.

Grab them in time for the fourth expansion of Guild Wars 2, coming to GeForce NOW at launch on Tuesday, Aug. 22. The Secrets of the Obscure paid expansion includes a new storyline, powerful combat options, new mount abilities and more.

New Games, Who Dis?

Jump into the list of the four new games hitting GeForce NOW this week:

• Techtonica (New release on Steam, July 18)
• Viewfinder (New release on Steam, July 18)
• Xenonauts 2 (New release on Steam, July 18)
• Embr (Steam)

Before heading into the weekend, check out our question of the week. Let us know your answer on Twitter or in the comments below.

Which video game character do you identify with the most and why?

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) July 19, 2023