Posts in category: nVidia AI

The NVIDIA Hopper GPU architecture unveiled today at GTC will accelerate dynamic programming — a problem-solving technique used in algorithms for genomics, quantum  computing, route optimization and more — by up to 40x with new DPX instructions.

An instruction set built into NVIDIA H100 GPUs, DPX will help developers write code to achieve speedups on dynamic programming algorithms in multiple industries, boosting workflows for disease diagnosis, quantum simulation, graph analytics and routing optimizations.

What Is Dynamic Programming? 

Developed in the 1950s, dynamic programming is a popular technique for solving complex problems with two key techniques: recursion and memoization.

Recursion involves breaking a problem down into simpler sub-problems, saving time and computational effort. In memoization, the answers to these sub-problems — which are reused several times when solving the main problem — are stored. Memoization increases efficiency, so sub-problems don’t need to be recomputed when needed later on in the main problem.

DPX instructions accelerate dynamic programming algorithms by up to 7x on an NVIDIA H100 GPU, compared with NVIDIA Ampere architecture-based GPUs. In a node with four NVIDIA H100 GPUs, that acceleration can be boosted even further.

Use Cases Span Healthcare, Robotics, Quantum Computing, Data Science

Dynamic programming is commonly used in many optimization, data processing and omics algorithms. To date, most developers have run these kinds of algorithms on CPUs or FPGAs — but can unlock dramatic speedups using DPX instructions on NVIDIA Hopper GPUs.

Omics 

Omics covers a range of biological fields including genomics (focused on DNA), proteomics (focused on proteins) and transcriptomics (focused on RNA). These fields, which inform the critical work of disease research and drug discovery, all rely on algorithmic analyses that can be sped up with DPX instructions.

For example, the Smith-Waterman and Needleman-Wunsch dynamic programming algorithms are used for DNA sequence alignment, protein classification and protein folding. Both use a scoring method to measure how well genetic sequences from different samples align.

Smith-Waterman produces highly accurate results, but takes more compute resources and time than other alignment methods. By using DPX instructions on a node with four NVIDIA H100 GPUs, scientists can speed this process 35x to achieve real-time processing, where the work of base calling and alignment takes place at the same rate as DNA sequencing.

This acceleration will help democratize genomic analysis in hospitals worldwide, bringing scientists closer to providing patients with personalized medicine.

Route Optimization

Finding the optimal route for multiple moving pieces is essential for autonomous robots moving through a dynamic warehouse, or even a sender transferring data to multiple receivers in a computer network.

To tackle this optimization problem, developers rely on Floyd-Warshall, a dynamic programming algorithm used to find the shortest distances between all pairs of destinations in a map or graph. In a server with four NVIDIA H100 GPUs, Floyd-Warshall acceleration is boosted 40x compared to a traditional dual-socket CPU-only server.

Paired with the NVIDIA cuOpt AI logistics software, this speedup in routing optimization could be used for real-time applications in factories, autonomous vehicles, or mapping and routing algorithms in abstract graphs.

Quantum Simulation

Countless other dynamic programming algorithms could be accelerated on NVIDIA H100 GPUs with DPX instructions. One promising field is quantum computing, where dynamic programming is used in tensor optimization algorithms for quantum simulation. DPX instructions could help developers accelerate the process of identifying the right tensor contraction order.

SQL Query Optimization

Another potential application is in data science. Data scientists working with the SQL programming language often need to perform several “join” operations on a set of tables.  Dynamic programming helps find an optimal order for these joins, often saving orders of magnitude in execution time and thus speeding up SQL queries.

Learn more about the NVIDIA Hopper GPU architecture. Register free for GTC, running online through March 24. And watch the replay of NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote address.

The largest AI models can require months to train on today’s computing platforms. That’s too slow for businesses.

AI, high performance computing and data analytics are growing in complexity with some models, like large language ones, reaching trillions of parameters.

The NVIDIA Hopper architecture is built from the ground up to accelerate these next-generation AI workloads with massive compute power and fast memory to handle growing networks and datasets.

Transformer Engine, part of the new Hopper architecture, will significantly speed up AI performance and capabilities, and help train large models within days or hours.

Training AI Models With Transformer Engine

Transformer models are the backbone of language models used widely today, such asBERT and GPT-3. Initially developed for natural language processing use cases, their versatility is increasingly being applied to computer vision, drug discovery and more.

However, model size continues to increase exponentially, now reaching trillions of parameters. This is causing training times to stretch into months due to huge amounts of computation, which is impractical for business needs.

Transformer Engine uses 16-bit floating-point precision and a newly added 8-bit floating-point data format combined with advanced software algorithms that will further speed up AI performance and capabilities.

AI training relies on floating-point numbers, which have fractional components, like 3.14. Introduced with the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, the TensorFloat32 (TF32) floating-point format is now the default 32-bit format in the TensorFlow and PyTorch frameworks.

Most AI floating-point math is done using 16-bit “half” precision (FP16), 32-bit “single” precision (FP32) and, for specialized operations, 64-bit “double” precision (FP64). By reducing the math to just eight bits, Transformer Engine makes it possible to train larger networks faster.

When coupled with other new features in the Hopper architecture — like the NVLink Switch system, which provides a direct high-speed interconnect between nodes — H100-accelerated server clusters will be able to train enormous networks that were nearly impossible to train at the speed necessary for enterprises.

Diving Deeper Into Transformer Engine

Transformer Engine uses software and custom NVIDIA Hopper Tensor Core technology designed to accelerate training for models built from the prevalent AI model building block, the transformer. These Tensor Cores can apply mixed FP8 and FP16 formats to dramatically accelerate AI calculations for transformers. Tensor Core operations in FP8 have twice the throughput of 16-bit operations.

The challenge for models is to intelligently manage the precision to maintain accuracy while gaining the performance of smaller, faster numerical formats. Transformer Engine enables this with custom, NVIDIA-tuned heuristics that dynamically choose between FP8 and FP16 calculations and automatically handle re-casting and scaling between these precisions in each layer.

The NVIDIA Hopper architecture also advances fourth-generation Tensor Cores by tripling the floating-point operations per second compared with prior-generation TF32, FP64, FP16 and INT8 precisions. Combined with Transformer Engine and fourth-generation NVLink, Hopper Tensor Cores enable an order-of-magnitude speedup for HPC and AI workloads.

Revving Up Transformer Engine

Much of the cutting-edge work in AI revolves around large language models like Megatron 530B. The chart below shows the growth of model size in recent years, a trend that is widely expected to continue. Many researchers are already working on trillion-plus parameter models for natural language understanding and other applications, showing an unrelenting appetite for AI compute power.

Meeting the demand of these growing models requires a combination of computational power and a ton of high-speed memory. The NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU delivers on both fronts, with the speedups made possible by Transformer Engine to take AI training to the next level.

When combined, these innovations deliver higher throughput and a 9x reduction in time to train, from seven days to just 20 hours:

Transformer Engine can also be used for inference without any data format conversions. Previously, INT8 was the go-to precision for optimal inference performance. However, it requires that the trained networks be converted to INT8 as part of the optimization process, something the NVIDIA TensorRT inference optimizer makes easy.

Using models trained with FP8 will allow developers to skip this conversion step altogether and do inference operations using that same precision. And like INT8-formatted networks, deployments using Transformer Engine can run in a much smaller memory footprint.

On Megatron 530B, NVIDIA H100 inference per-GPU throughput is up to 30x higher than NVIDIA A100, with a 1-second response latency, showcasing it as the optimal platform for AI deployments:

To learn more about NVIDIA H100 GPU and the Hopper architecture, watch the GTC 2022 keynote from Jensen Huang. Register for GTC 2022 for free to attend sessions with NVIDIA and industry leaders.”

Everyone wants to be heard. And with more people than ever in video calls or live streaming from their home offices, rich audio free from echo hiccups and background noises like barking dogs is key to better sounding online experiences.

NVIDIA Maxine offers GPU-accelerated, AI-enabled software development kits to help developers build scalable, low-latency audio and video effects pipelines that improve call quality and user experience.

Today, NVIDIA announced at GTC that Maxine is adding acoustic echo cancellation and AI-based upsampling for better sound quality.

Acoustic Echo Cancellation eliminates acoustic echo from the audio stream in real time, preserving speech quality even during double-talk. With AI-based technology, Maxine achieves more effective echo cancellation than that achieved via traditional digital signal processing algorithms.

Audio Super Resolution improves the quality of a low-bandwidth audio signal by restoring the energy lost in higher frequency bands using AI-based techniques. Maxine Audio Super Resolution supports upsampling the audio  from 8 kHz (narrowband) to 16 kHz (wideband), from 16 kHz to 48 kHz (ultra-wideband) and from 8 kHz to 48 kHz. Lower sampling rates such as 8 kHz often result in muffled voices and emphasize artifacts such as sibilance and make the speech difficult to understand.

Modern film and television studios often use 48 kHz (or higher) sampling rate for recording audio, in order to maintain fidelity of the original signal and preserve clarity. Audio Super Resolution can help restore the fidelity of old audio recordings, derived from magnetic tapes or other low bandwidth media.

Bridging the Sound Gap 

Most modern telecommunication takes place using wideband or ultra-wideband audio. Since NVIDIA Audio Super Resolution can upsample and restore the narrowband audio in real-time, the technology can effectively be used to bridge the quality gap between traditional copper wire phone lines and modern VoIP-based wideband communication systems.

Real-time communication — whether for conference calls, call centers or live streaming of all kinds — is taking a big leap forward with Maxine.

Since its initial release, Maxine has been adopted by many of the world’s leading providers for video communications, content creation and live streaming.

The worldwide market for video conferencing is expected to increase to nearly $13 billion in 2028, up from about $6.3 billion in 2021, according to Fortune Business Insights.

WFH: A Way of Life 

The move to work from home, or WFH, has become an accepted norm across companies, and organizations are adapting to the new expectations.

Analyst firm Gartner estimates that only a quarter of meetings for enterprises will be in person in 2024, a decline from 60 percent pre-pandemic.

Virtual collaboration in the U.S. has played an important role as people have taken on hybrid and remote positions in the past two years amid the pandemic.

But as organizations seek to maintain company culture and workplace experience, the stakes have risen for higher-quality media interactivity.

Solving the Cocktail Party Problem    

But sometimes work and home life collide. As a result, meetings are often filled with background noises from kids, construction work outside or emergency vehicle sirens, causing brief interruptions in the flow of conference calls.

Maxine helps solve an age-old audio issue known as the cocktail party problem. With AI, it can filter out unwanted background noises, allowing users to be better heard, whether they’re in a home office or on the road.

The Maxine GPU-accelerated platform provides an end-to-end deep learning pipeline that integrates with customizable state-of-the-art models, enabling high-quality features with a standard microphone and camera.

Sound Like Your Best Self

In addition to being impacted by background noise, audio quality in virtual activities can sometimes sound thin, missing low- and mid-level frequencies, or even be barely audible.

Maxine enables upsampling of audio in real time so that voices sound fuller, deeper and more audible.

Logitech: Better Audio for Headsets and Blue Yeti Microphones

Logitech, a leading maker of peripherals, is implementing Maxine for better interactions with its popular headsets and microphones.

Tapping into AI libraries, Logitech has integrated Maxine directly inside G Hub audio drivers to enhance communications with its devices without the need for additional software. Maxine takes advantage of the powerful Tensor Cores in NVIDIA RTX GPUs so consumers can enjoy real-time processing of their mic signal.

Logitech is now utilizing Maxine’s state-of-the-art denoising in its G Hub software. That has allowed it to remove echoes and background noises — such as fans, as well as keyboard and mouse clicks — that can distract from video conferences or live-streaming sessions.

“NVIDIA Maxine makes it fast and easy for Logitech G gamers to clean up their mic signal and eliminate unwanted background noises in a single click.” said Ujesh Desai, GM of Logitech G. “You can even use G HUB to test your mic signal to make sure you have your Maxine settings dialed in.”

Logitech is now taking advantage of Maxine’s state-of-the-art denoising in its G Hub software. That has allowed it to remove echoes and background noises — such as fans, as well as keyboard and mouse clicks — that can distract from video conferences or live-streaming sessions.

“NVIDIA Maxine makes it fast and easy for users to clean up their mic signal and eliminate unwanted background noises in a single click,” said Ujesh Desai, vice president at Logitech. “You can even test your mic signal to find the perfect settings for your setup.”

Tencent Cloud Boosts Content Creators

Tencent Cloud is helping content creators with their productions by offering technology from NVIDIA Maxine that makes it quick and easy to add creative backgrounds.

NVIDIA Maxine’s AI Green Screen feature enables users to create a more immersive presence with high-quality foreground and background separation — without the need for a traditional green screen. Once the real background is separated, it can easily be replaced with a virtual background, or blurred to create a depth-of-field effect. Tencent Cloud is offering this new capability as a software-as-a-service package for content creators.

NVIDIA Maxine’s AI Green Screen technology helps content creators with their productions by enabling more immersive high quality experiences, without the need for specialized equipment and lighting” said Director of the Product Center, Vulture Li at Tencent Cloud audio and video platform.

Making Virtual Experiences Better

NVIDIA Maxine provides state-of-the-art real-time AI audio, video and augmented reality features that can be built into customizable, end-to-end deep learning pipelines.

The AI-powered SDKs from Maxine help developers to create applications that include audio and image denoising, super resolution, gaze correction, 3D body pose estimation and translation features.

Maxine also enables real-time voice-to-text translation for a growing number of languages. At GTC, NVIDIA demonstrated Maxine translating between English, French, German and Spanish.

These effects will allow millions of people to enjoy high-quality and engaging live-streaming video across any device.

Join us at GTC this week to learn more about Maxine in the following session:

• Put Your Body into It! Easy Talent Tracking in Virtual Environments

When your software can evoke tears of joy, you spread the cheer.

So, Translator, a Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service, is applying some of the world’s largest AI models to help more people communicate.

“There are so many cool stories,” said Vishal Chowdhary, development manager for Translator.

Like the five-day sprint to add Haitian Creole to power apps that helped aid workers after Haiti suffered a 7.0 earthquake in 2010. Or the grandparents who choked up in their first session using the software to speak live with remote grandkids who spoke a language they did not understand.

An Ambitious Goal

“Our vision is to eliminate barriers in all languages and modalities with this same API that’s already being used by thousands of developers,” said Chowdhary.

With some 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, it’s an ambitious goal.

So, the team turned to a powerful, and complex, tool — a mixture of experts (MoE) AI approach.

It’s a state-of-the-art member of the class of transformer models driving rapid advances in natural language processing. And with 5 billion parameters, it’s 80x larger than the biggest model the team has in production for natural-language processing.

MoE models are so compute-intensive, it’s hard to find anyone who’s put them into production. In an initial test, CPU-based servers couldn’t meet the team’s requirement to use them to translate a document in one second.

A 27x Speedup

Then the team ran the test on accelerated systems with NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise 2.0 platform announced this week at GTC.

“Using NVIDIA GPUs and Triton we could do it, and do it efficiently,” said Chowdhary.

In fact, the team was able to achieve up to a 27x speedup over non-optimized GPU runtimes.

“We were able to build one model to perform different language understanding tasks — like summarizing, text generation and translation — instead of having to develop separate models for each task,” said Hanny Hassan Awadalla, a principal researcher at Microsoft who supervised the tests.

How Triton Helped

Microsoft’s models break down a big job like translating a stack of documents into many small tasks of translating hundreds of sentences. Triton’s dynamic batching feature pools these many requests to make best use of a GPU’s muscle.

The team praised Triton’s ability to run any model in any mode using CPUs, GPUs or other accelerators.

“It seems very well thought out with all the features I wanted for my scenario, like something I would have developed for myself,” said Chowdhary, whose team has been developing large-scale distributed systems for more than a decade.

Under the hood, two software components were key to Triton’s success. NVIDIA extended FasterTransformer — a software layer that handles inference computations — to support MoE models. CUTLASS, an NVIDIA math library, helped implement the models efficiently.

Proven Prototype in Four Weeks

Though the tests were complex, the team worked with NVIDIA engineers to get an end-to-end prototype with Triton up and running in less than a month.

“That’s a really impressive timeline to make a shippable product — I really appreciate that,” said Awadalla.

And though it was the team’s first experience with Triton, “we used it to ship the MoE models by rearchitecting our runtime environment without a lot of effort, and now I hope it becomes part of our long-term host system,” Chowdhary added.

Taking the Next Steps

The accelerated service will arrive in judicious steps, initially for document translation in a few major languages.

“Eventually, we want our customers to get the goodness of these new models transparently in all our scenarios,” said Chowdhary.

The work is part of a broad initiative at Microsoft. It aims to fuel advances across a wide sweep of its products such as Office and Teams, as well as those of its developers and customers from small one-app companies to Fortune 500 enterprises.

Paving the way, Awadalla’s team published research in September on training MoE models with up to 200 billion parameters on NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Since then, the team’s accelerated that work another 8x by using 80G versions of the A100 GPUs on models with more than 300 billion parameters.

“The models will need to get larger and larger to better represent more languages, especially for ones where we don’t have a lot of data,” Adawalla said.

NVIDIA’s GTC conference is packed with smart people and programming.

The virtual gathering — which takes place from March 21-24 — sits at the intersection of some of the fastest-moving technologies of our time.

It features a lineup of speakers from every corner of industry, academia and research who are ready to paint a high-definition portrait of how they’re putting the latest technology to work.

A Can’t-Miss Keynote

GTC starts with a keynote from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

Each GTC, Huang introduces powerful new ways to accelerate computing of all kinds, and tells a story that puts the latest advances in perspective.

Expect Huang to introduce new technologies, products and collaborations with some of the world’s leading companies.

The keynote will be live-streamed Tuesday, March 22, starting at 8 a.m. Pacific, and available on-demand afterward. Conference registration isn’t required to watch.

Leaders From Trillion-Dollar Industries

Huang is joined by people at the cutting edge of fields in industry, research and academia who can get you oriented on how accelerated computing is remaking the world.

The event features 900 sessions representing a broad spectrum of organizations, including Amazon, Bloomberg, DeepMind, Epic Games, Google Brain, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, NASA, NFL, Pfizer, Visa, VMware, Walt Disney, Zoom and many more.

This GTC will focus on accelerated computing, deep learning, data science, digital twins, networking, quantum computing and computing in the data center, cloud and edge.

In addition to participants from NVIDIA, GTC will feature prominent technology experts including:

• Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning.AI, founder and CEO of Landing AI
• Bjorn Stevens, managing director and director of The Atmosphere in the Earth System, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
• Chelsea Finn, assistant professor of computer science, Stanford University
• Hao Yang, vice president of AI Research, Visa
• Jack Jin, lead machine learning Infra engineer, Zoom
• Joe Ucuzoglu, CEO, Deloitte U.S.
• Lidia Fonseca, chief digital and technology officer, Pfizer
• Magnus Östberg, chief software officer, Mercedes-Benz AG
• Marc Petit, general manager for Unreal Engine, Epic Games
• Markus Gross, vice president of Research, Walt Disney Studios
• Michael Russinovich, CTO and Technical Fellow, Microsoft Azure
• Natalya Tatarchuk, director of global graphics, Unity
• Peter Stone, executive director, Sony AI, and professor of computer science, University of Texas, Austin
• Stefan Sicklinger, head of BigLoop and Advanced Systems, CARIAD/VW Group
• Yu Liu, director of AI, Meta
• Zoe Lofgren, member of Congress, U.S. House of Representatives

Spotlight on Startups

NVIDIA Inception, a global program to nurture cutting-edge startups with 9,000+ members, will host tracks aimed at helping emerging companies build and grow their businesses and gain industry knowledge.

Sessions designed for venture capital firms include: “Emerging Venture Themes for 2022 – Omniverse + Metaverse” and “Emerging Venture Themes for 2022 – Quantum Computing.”

Learning and Development 

GTC also offers excellent opportunities for new and experienced developers to get training in some of the hottest areas in technology.

It starts with Learning Day on Monday, March 21, and continues all week. There will be sessions in four languages across multiple time zones from NVIDIA subject-matter experts and through NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute and the NVIDIA Academy.

Students and early-career professionals can participate in introductory deep learning and robotics courses. These include sessions like “The Right Formula for AI Success: Insights from AI High Performer,” “Deep Learning Demystified” and the “5 Steps for Starting a Career in AI” panel.

More experienced developers can enroll in DLI courses. Participants can dig as deeply as they like, even after the conference ends and earn DLI certificates demonstrating subject-matter competency.

And through the end of March, new members to NVIDIA’s Developer Program can access an additional free GTC DLI course when they sign up.

Developed for IT professionals, NVIDIA Academy will host certified training programs on the data center, InfiniBand, IT infrastructure and networking. The program includes instructor led-training sessions followed by self-paced coursework and proctored certification tests.

Supporting AI Ecosystem for All

As part of NVIDIA’s commitment to making AI accessible for all developer communities and emerging markets, numerous sessions will showcase how developers and startups in emerging economies are building and scaling AI and data science.

Sessions for emerging markets include “Look to Africa to Advance Artificial Intelligence” and “Democratizing AI in Emerging Markets Through the United AI Alliance.”

NVIDIA also provides free credits for DLI courses to minority-serving institutions, from community colleges to historically Black colleges and universities.

Visit the GTC site to register for free.

It’s never been easier to be a PC gamer.

GeForce NOW is your gateway into PC gaming. With the power of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs in the cloud, any gamer can stream titles from the top digital games stores — even on low-powered hardware.

Evolve to the PC gaming ranks this GFN Thursday and get ready for seven more games streaming from the GeForce NOW library this week, including PC exclusives like Dread Hunger.

Set Yourself Free

Thanks to GeForce NOW, more gamers than ever can experience what it means to play PC games at unbelievable quality, across nearly all devices.

Members can stream over 1,000 PC titles that they own from digital game stores like Steam, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect, Origin and GOG.com. And because they’re streaming from the cloud, nearly any of their devices can become a GeForce gaming rig — even Macs or mobile devices.

Playing PC games means getting access to an entire universe of PC exclusives — titles unavailable on other platforms. Unite and survive in Valheim, or battle for supremacy in Dota 2. Conquer the universe in EVE Online, or be the last one standing in Ring of Elysium. Join hundreds of players to explore New World, or squad up with other ghost hunters in Phasmophobia. The options are nearly endless.

Members on the RTX 3080 membership — now available in a 1-month option — can experience the next generation of cloud gaming, streaming gameplay on PC and Mac at up to 1440 pixels and 120 frames per second. And with support for NVIDIA DLSS and RTX ON, titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Dying Light 2 are rendered at gorgeous cinematic quality — the way they were meant to be played.

New games join the GeForce NOW library every GFN Thursday, including the hottest PC titles like Dread Hunger, which pits you and seven others in a deadly game of survival and betrayal. Even with a small personal collection to start, instantly jump into nearly 100 free-to-play games from Steam and the Epic Games Store. All progress syncs with the cloud, so you can keep playing across your devices, or even on your own GeForce gaming rig.

Ready to join the PC universe? Sign up for a GeForce NOW membership, download the app or access the service directly from a supported browser and link game stores to your GeForce NOW library to start playing PC games across devices today.

Jump On In

There’s always something new to play on GeForce NOW. Here’s the complete list of seven titles coming this week:

• Monster Energy Supercross – The Official Videogame 5 (New release on Steam)
• Tunic (New release on Steam)
• Syberia: The World Before (New release on Steam and Epic Games Store, March 18)
• Blood West (Steam)
• Dread Hunger (Steam)
• Hero’s Hour (Steam)
• Hundred Days – Winemaking Simulator (Steam and Epic Games Store)

With the power of the cloud and all of these new games, we’ve got all that you need to be a PC gamer right here on Twitter:

it’s never been easier to become a PC gamer… pic.twitter.com/qzjNbyYLRD

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) March 16, 2022

For the 14th consecutive year, each Academy Award nominee for the Best Visual Effects used NVIDIA technologies.

The 94th annual Academy Awards ceremony, taking place Sunday, March 27, has five nominees in the running:

• Dune
• Free Guy
• No Time to Die
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
• Spider-Man: No Way Home

NVIDIA has been pushing the boundaries of computer graphics for decades, enabling innovative studios and their incredibly talented artists around the world to create award-winning visual effects in films.

The latest technologies, powered by NVIDIA RTX, help artists push their creativity and craft to new levels of realism, bringing stunning visuals to the big screen.

Dystopian Worlds Come to Life in Epic Story

From flying spacecrafts to giant sandworms, the gorgeous, futuristic visuals in Dune were produced by Academy-Award winning studio DNEG.

For the sci-fi film, DNEG contributed to 28 sequences and nearly 1,200 visual effects (VFX) shots, with each elaborate element designed to bring director Denis Villeneuve’s vision to life. To do so, the studio worked across multiple locations with remote artists using virtual workstations powered by NVIDIA RTX.

DNEG was the first studio to implement NVIDIA virtual GPU software at scale. Now, DNEG continues its pioneering efforts with NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise as the studio looks to the future of connected, collaborative workflows.

“Every show we get is different from the last, and NVIDIA RTX with vGPU lets us scale the memory and performance characteristics up or down to meet the needs of our artists,” said Daire Byrne, global head of systems at DNEG.

Exhilarating Visuals Go Beyond for Bond

DNEG secured a second Academy Award nomination with the latest James Bond installment, No Time to Die. This is the first Bond film to receive a VFX Oscar nomination since 1979’s Moonraker.

To create the film’s action-packed scenes, explosions and massive environments, DNEG delivered over 500 VFX shots. Its team used detailed references and scans to help design everything — from a glider and a sinking ship, to the island headquarters and thrilling car chases.

Breaking Out of Virtual and Parallel Universes

Three-time Oscar-winning studio Digital Domain received two VFX nominations this year for Free Guy and Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Its team created almost 350 VFX shots for Free Guy, for assets like digital doubles to entire computer graphics-based cities. Free Guy is also one of the first feature films that used Digital Domain’s face-swapping tool, Charlatan.

Charlatan replaces the face of a character with a hand-created facial model, and then combines it with the original performance using AI. This provides much more realistic results when working with digital doubles. Digital Domain also helped build the visuals for “Free City,” the game environment where the film takes place.

For Spider-Man: No Way Home, Digital Domain digitally recreated 2.5 square miles of New York City, one of the biggest computer graphics environments the studio has ever built.

A dramatic fight sequence — which shows the web-slinging hero battling the villainous Doc Ock and his mechanical arms — takes place on a bridge, with visuals and computer graphics elements that include various people, vehicles and weather conditions.

Digital Domain also used a digital double for Doc Ock, a character that actor Alfred Molina first played 18 years ago in the film Spider-Man 2.

Marvelous Characters Clash on Big Screen

Another one of Disney’s most recent Marvel films, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, showcased magical visuals from creative studio Weta Digital.

Weta worked on 300 shots and VFX sequences that included an epic dragon battle, realistic water simulations and the magical rings themselves. One of Weta’s challenges was to create the breathtaking sequences with the Great Protector, a wingless dragon, and the Dweller-in-Darkness, a creature made up of 128 million polygons.

Weta created custom rigs to deliver performances that emphasized the massive scale and weight of each creature. The team also developed a new AI system to assist with facial performances on the digital double of Shang-Chi’s father and main antagonist, Xu Wenwu.

Explore More VFX and Virtual Productions at GTC

While only one team will accept the award for Best Visual Effects, millions of artists create stunning visuals and cinematics with NVIDIA RTX technology. Learn more at NVIDIA GTC, which takes place March 21-24.

Registration for GTC is free. Sign up to experience how award-winning studios in the industry, including DNEG, HBO and ILMxLAB, are using NVIDIA RTX to unleash new possibilities in storytelling.

Featured image courtesy of DNEG.

Say hello to tomorrow’s smart electric meter, literally.

You can ask some next-generation home energy hubs questions, just like you do Alexa or Siri.

Some devices, arriving this year, will display real-time simulations — vibrant as a video game — to show how you can lower your energy bill or reduce your carbon footprint. They’ll help manage power flows for solar panels and electric vehicle chargers.

Like smartphones, they’ll run apps. And they’ll give utilities a clearer picture of the grid, including warnings if a component on a nearby powerline could fail soon.

A Tale of Two Innovators

Devices from startup Anuranet will switch on in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of homes starting this fall using the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform.

Utilidata, a Rhode Island-based company developing grid software for a decade, is working with NVIDIA to develop a Jetson-based smart grid chip. It will be used in meters to bring real-time AI applications to the edge.

The efforts are part of a vision for a smarter, cleaner, safer grid that NVIDIA and partners are helping make a reality.

“Today’s smart meters are not very smart, but with the edge-computing power of the Jetson GPU and our software platform we will create truly intelligent meters that will change the energy-control network one home and one building at a time,” said Diane Zuckerman (pictured above), co-founder of Austin, Texas-based Anuranet, the latest of a half-dozen startups she has launched worldwide.

Engaging Simplicity

Anuranet is developing the Bullfrog brand of smart meters and circuit panels powered by the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform. They can connect to the grid as well as smart appliances, home energy hubs, solar panels, electric-vehicle chargers and their batteries to help customers save on energy bills while decreasing their carbon footprint in real time.

“Their simplicity will engage consumers, creating value with high performance and security,” Zuckerman said.

Although it’s just eight months old, the startup has signed contracts with two companies that will start deploying its devices this year in new homes.

Richland Partners, in Nashville, will use the Anuranet Bullfrog energy ecosystem in homes and apartments it’s building. Neu Communities in Austin will use them to manage private microgrids in new residential neighborhoods it’s constructing.

Jetson Reshapes Edge Computing

Today’s smart meters throw away most of the energy-related data in the home because they lack the compute muscle to process it. It’s a treasure trove of real-time data that Anuranet, Utilidata and others will use to improve the grid.

For example, NVIDIA Jetson-powered smart meters can take measurements tens of thousands of times a second.

“Encoded in that data is information about the quality of the power flow and what might be interfering with it,” explained Marissa Hummon, CTO of Utilidata, an NVIDIA Inception partner that’s already built applications for some of the world’s largest metering companies.

“A tree branch might impact the wave form and if we can see that we can predict an outage — that kind of insight is something lots of apps can use, so it’s creating an environment for others to innovate,” she said.

Deploying the Best Algorithms

Backed by investments from Microsoft and NVIDIA, Utilidata aims to understand power flows in ways that benefit both consumers and utilities. That requires machine learning and the compute horsepower to run it.

“No human can look at all these patterns to find the key insights, but computers can, and our software running on the Jetson-based smart grid chip will let us deploy the best algorithms,” added Hummon.

Utilidata and the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab are collaborating to run the lab’s real-time power flow software on Utilidata’s smart grid chip. And several utilities are in discussions with Utilidata to pilot its chip in smart meter deployments.

Why the Grid Needs AI

Smart meters are well positioned for tracking and responding to the two-way power flows rapidly coming to the edge of the grid.

Homes and businesses are installing batteries and solar panels that make them power generators. At the same time, they’re putting in electric-vehicle chargers that draw more than three times the power of the large air conditioners that used to drive grid demand. And with recent funding in the U.S. many more chargers and their grid demands will be coming online fast.

“You can’t write a good physics model to track all this, it requires a different approach to the problem that’s incredibly well geared to GPU computation,” said Hummon, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard.

“That’s why edge AI has gone from a nice-to-have to an urgent need for utilities preparing for what their customers are doing,” she added.

Startups Get Accelerated

Products from both startups will rely on NVIDIA full-stack technologies and an open platform for third-party app developers.

Hummon, of Utilidata, praised NVIDIA Inception, which nurtures technology startups, providing investor introductions, expertise and technology.

As part of the work developing the software-defined smart grid chip with NVIDIA, Inception gave her team access to GPUs in the cloud and training on how to make the best use of them. Inception also provided connections to other innovators across the power sector.

Smart Meters Get a Voice

For its part, Anuranet will make its Bullfrog devices come alive with conversational AI that combines its internal code for natural-language understanding with the automatic speech recognition in NVIDIA Riva, a GPU-accelerated software development kit for building speech AI applications.

“The accuracy of our code is already double that of rival offerings, and with Riva I expect we will outperform anything on the market by an order of magnitude,” said Anuranet CTO David L. Brock, a Ph.D. in robotics and AI from MIT, who developed a novel approach to natural language understanding.

“Riva is very exciting, and we will expect to expand our use of it in the future,” he added.

It’s one more way NVIDIA is fueling the transition to a more resilient grid and sustainable future.

In separate sessions at GTC, Utilidata will share how edge AI is redefining grid operations and tackling climate change. Register free and check out the full lineup of power and utilities sessions.

The GeForce NOW RTX 3080 membership gives gamers unrivaled performance from the cloud – with latency so low that it feels just like playing on a local PC.

Today, gamers can experience RTX 3080-class streaming at only $19.99 a month, thanks to GeForce NOW’s new monthly membership plans*.

It’s a great chance to experience powerful cloud gaming with the six games joining the GeForce NOW library this week.

More Power at a Lower Price

Starting today, members have an easier way to try out the next generation of cloud gaming – one month at a time. GeForce NOW RTX 3080 memberships are now available in one-month increments, alongside our existing six-month subscriptions.

GeForce NOW RTX 3080 memberships boost nearly any device into a powerful gaming rig. Our highest offering is capable of streaming at up to 1440p resolution and 120 frames per second on PCs, native 1440p or 1600p at 120 FPS on Macs, and 4K HDR at 60 FPS on SHIELD TV.

Members maximize their cloud gaming experience with ultra-low latency that goes head-to-head against many local gaming experiences, eight-hour session lengths and full control to customize in-game graphics settings, including RTX ON rendering environments in cinematic quality in supported games.

It’s never been easier to discover why Digital Foundry declared GeForce NOW’s RTX 3080 membership “the best streaming system we’ve played.” Level up your gaming experience with all of the perks that come with the one-month RTX 3080 membership for just $19.99.

Or, sign up for a six-month RTX 3080 membership and get one month free, streaming across devices for $99.99. Founders members who have been with us since the beginning will also receive 10 percent off the subscription price and can upgrade with no risk to their “Founders for Life” benefits.

Check out our membership FAQ for more information.

Did Somebody Say ‘More Video Games?’

Looking for the perfect game to pair with your monthly RTX 3080 membership? Get ready for six more games streaming from the GeForce NOW library.

Catch the full list of games ready to stream this week:

• Buccaneers! (New release on Steam)
• Distant Worlds 2 (New release on Steam)
• Ironsmith Medieval Simulator (New release on Steam)
• Bus Driver Simulator (Steam)
• Martha is Dead (Steam)
• Survival Quiz CITY (Steam)

Plus, a world comes to an end in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök, the new downloadable content coming to the game today. Unleash new divine powers, embark on a quest through a breathtaking world to save your son and complete a legendary Viking saga, streaming on the cloud.

Finally, the release timing for The Settlers has shifted and will join GeForce NOW at a later date.

Play all of the titles arriving this week and more with the power of RTX 3080 with just a one-month commitment. This week also comes with a question for you. Let us know your answer on Twitter:

you just finished 1 month of gaming, how many hours did you play?

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) February 23, 2022

*Prices may vary depending on local region. Check GeForceNOW.com for more info.

Excelero, a Tel Aviv-based provider of high-performance software-defined storage, is now a part of NVIDIA.

The company’s team of engineers — including its seasoned co-founders with decades of experience in HPC, storage and networking — bring deep expertise in the block storage that large businesses use in storage-area networks.

Now their mission is to help expand support for block storage in our enterprise software stack such as clusters for high performance computing. Block storage also has an important role to play inside the DOCA software framework that runs on our DPUs.

“The Excelero team is joining NVIDIA as demand is surging for high-performance computing and AI,” said Yaniv Romem, CEO and co-founder of Excelero. “We’ll be working with NVIDIA to ensure our existing customers are supported, and going forward we’re thrilled to apply our expertise in block storage to NVIDIA’s world-class AI and HPC platforms,” he added.

Founded in 2014, Excelero developed NVMesh, software that manages and secures virtual arrays of NVMe flash drives as block storage available across public and private clouds.

Excelero’s software has won praise from users for its high throughput, low latency and support for Kubernetes containers. It’s also attracted collaborations with major cloud service providers.

The company has been an NVIDIA partner since its early days, attracting the former Mellanox, now part of NVIDIA, as an investor. We collaborated on accelerating storage with RDMA, a key technology at the heart of both InfiniBand and RoCE (Ethernet) networks.

NVIDIA will continue to support Excelero’s customers by honoring its contracts. Looking ahead, Excelero’s technology will be integrated into NVIDIA’s enterprise software stack.

We welcome this world-class engineering team to NVIDIA.