Posts in category: nVidia AI

NVIDIA is America’s best place to work, according to Glassdoor’s just-issued list of best employers for 2022.

Amid a global pandemic that has affected every workplace, NVIDIA was ranked No. 1 on Glassdoor’s 14th annual Best Places to Work list for large US companies. The award is based on anonymous employee feedback covering thousands of companies.

Other companies ranked highly by current and former employees include tech companies Google and Salesforce, and fitness wear retailer Lululemon. NVIDIA ranked second on the list last year.

Half of the top ten large US company winners are tech firms and 40 percent of the entire list of top 100 employers are tech companies.

“The world of work is rapidly evolving, fueled by the pandemic and now millions of workers re-evaluating their expectations from employers,” Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong said. “This year’s Best Places to Work winners are leading the way by listening and responding to employee feedback and reimagining the employee experience to truly put their people first.”

NVIDIA employees consistently give the company high marks on Glassdoor’s survey.

95 percent would recommend NVIDIA to a friend. The same proportion say the company has a positive business outlook. And 98 percent approve of the CEO, Jensen Huang.

“NVIDIA’s a place where folks who love working hard and enjoy tough challenges will feel at home,” one anonymous employee wrote on the site, which gets 67 million views each month.

“Leaders walk the talk with culture and values,” another wrote. “Everyone is genuinely helpful to train and ramp new employees, decision making is fast, title and hierarchy is never in the way of doing what is right.”

“The best workplace I have witnessed to date,” another noted.

The reviews from current and former employees capture an authentic look at companies.

When sharing a company review on Glassdoor, employees are encouraged to rate their satisfaction with the company overall and key workplace factors such as career opportunities, compensation and benefits, culture and values, diversity and inclusion, senior management, and work-life balance.

In addition, employees are asked to describe the best reasons to work at their companies and any downsides.

Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work were determined using company reviews from U.S.-based employees from Oct. 20, 2020, to Oct. 18, 2021.

Want to leave a review of your own? First, you’ll need to join our team. Check out our careers hub at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/careers/.

For the complete list of the Glassdoor Best Places to Work winners, visit https://www.glassdoor.com/Award/Best-Places-to-Work-LST_KQ0,19.htm

Bright Computing, a leader in software for managing high performance computing systems used by more than 700 organizations worldwide, is now part of NVIDIA.

Companies in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and other markets use its tool to set up and run HPC clusters, groups of servers linked by high-speed networks into a single unit. Its product, Bright Cluster Manager, becomes the latest addition to NVIDIA’s software stack for accelerated computing.

Bright Computing, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Amsterdam, has customers that include household names such as Boeing, NASA, Tesla, Johns Hopkins University and Siemens.

We’ve been working with Bright for more than a decade as they integrated their software with our GPUs, networking, CUDA and most recently DGX systems.

Now we see an opportunity to combine our system software capabilities to make HPC data centers easier to buy, build and operate, creating a much larger future for HPC.

NVIDIA’s partners will take Bright’s software to more markets. And Bright’s software and expertise will enhance our growing NVIDIA DGX and data center businesses.

Bright’s flexible software can run at the edge, in the data center and across multiple public or hybrid clouds. It automates administration for clusters whether they’re made up of a handful or hundreds of thousands of servers. And it supports Arm and x86 CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs and Kubernetes containers.

We welcome Bright’s employees into NVIDIA. Together, we’ll continue to support Bright’s customers and invest in its product roadmap to grow the business.

“NVIDIA is changing the world as we know it, and we couldn’t be more excited for our team and software to play a part in that,” said Bill Wagner, CEO of Bright Computing.

Ready for the Industrial HPC Era

The combination of HPC, accelerated computing and AI has spawned what NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang calls “an industrial HPC era.”

Clusters are at the heart of HPC’s scale-out style of computing, born in supercomputing centers and increasingly going mainstream to support AI.

Companies and developers in every field are adopting HPC systems to build physically accurate 3D simulations and digital twins for work as diverse as drug discovery, product design and factory automation — many of them using NVIDIA Omniverse.

Bolstered by Bright Computing’s team and software, NVIDIA will continue to democratize access to HPC and accelerated computing.

To make the best portfolio decisions, banks need to accurately calculate values of their trades, while factoring in uncertain external risks. This requires high-performance computing power to run complex derivatives models — which find fair prices for financial contracts — as close to real time as possible.

“You don’t want to trade today on yesterday’s data. You want to have up-to-the-moment portfolio values under many possible scenarios,” said Ryan Ferguson, CEO of Riskfuel, a Toronto-based startup that has built an AI-based accelerator technology for valuation and risk workloads.

Ferguson used to run securitization and credit derivatives for Scotiabank Global Banking and Markets. He noticed this industry-wide challenge and shifted his career to help address it, founding Riskfuel in 2019.

The company trains and develops its AI models using NVIDIA DGX systems, NVIDIA GPUs and the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing platform.

Riskfuel is also a member of NVIDIA Inception, which is a free program for cutting-edge startups. The program provides access to training credits from the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute, technology assistance, awareness support and opportunities to connect with investors. As a community member,

Speeding Up Sluggish Models

Riskfuel’s first customer happened to be Ferguson’s old employer, Scotiabank. When that work garnered the bank an industry award, the market noticed.

The company then partnered with Bank of Montreal (BMO), which was looking to improve the performance of its CPU-based structured notes models.

BMO employed industry-standard Monte Carlo simulations to process pricing requests, each of which could take several minutes to run on a single CPU core. But that’s too sluggish for the massive quantity of simulations required and the number of deals being run through many risk scenarios every day.

A pilot project showed that versions of BMO models accelerated by Riskfuel and deployed on NVIDIA DGX systems dramatically improved performance. Ultimately, it lets the bank expand its client base, drive higher trade flows, generate new risk insights and lead to better product design and selection.

According to Lucas Caliri, managing director and head of Cross Asset Solutions at BMO, “The partnership with Riskfuel and NVIDIA is enabling us to assist our clients to handle more complex hedging strategies and — with accelerated pricing and analysis — make faster, smarter investment decisions.”

Building a GPU-Powered ‘Rocket’

Riskfuel built its model by training it on 650 million data points, using NVIDIA DGX A100, which Ferguson calls an “AI workhorse.”

The startup works with banks’ code by using their CPU models to create training datasets for neural nets, which run on GPUs using PyTorch, TensorFlow or any other AI library. Then, it delivers its product as packaged neural nets, allowing customers to choose whether to run inference on NVIDIA A100, A30 or other NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs.

Once the Riskfuel model is in, banks notice a huge speedup, while maintaining the same API for model access.

“We take their car into the garage, rip the engine out and put a rocket in,” said Ferguson. “It looks like the same car, but on the inside, it produces the results way faster.”

Riskfuel’s model sacrifices nothing in the way of accuracy — even with all that speed — no matter how far a bank might push it. Ferguson said that banks no longer have to trade speed for accuracy, or vice versa.

“Historically, there’s basically been a toggle that says faster or more accurate,” Ferguson said. “With Riskfuel, you can get fast and accurate.”

Just the Beginning

Looking forward, Riskfuel hopes to provide solutions for more areas in which banks can’t process scenarios fast enough. For example, previously, banks had to choose which risk scenarios to run, but that limitation is being removed.

“Now that their derivatives portfolio models can run in seconds, banks need real-time data and faster risk scenario generation,” said Ivan Sergienko, chief product officer at Riskfuel. “These are potential growth areas for us.”

Learn more about NVIDIA offerings for the financial services industry.

WFH was likely one the most-used acronyms of the past year, with more businesses looking to enhance their employees’ remote experiences than ever.

Creative production studio Taylor James found a cloud-based solution to maintain efficiency and productivity — even while working remotely — with NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstations on AWS.

With locations in New York, Los Angeles, London and Mexico, Taylor James creates stunning content for projects like interactive experiences, product commercials for automotive clients and visuals for healthcare campaigns.

Previously, the IT team at Taylor James faced the challenge of supporting an inconsistent desktop environment, where some users had more powerful machines and capabilities than others.

The studio also wanted to upgrade its infrastructure of on-premises hardware, which consisted of render farms and storage servers with lengthy service contracts and minimal opportunity for cost efficiencies.

Adopting NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstations on AWS, Taylor James migrated all of its production operations to the cloud, providing all of its artists with powerful virtual machines accessible from anywhere.

This allowed the studio to better equip its creative teams to do their best work, while expanding their workforce by attracting top candidates who could work from anywhere — without the constraints of in-office desktop equipment.

“With NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstations on AWS, we have access to the latest technology all the time,” said Mark Knowles, general manager of Creative Production at Taylor James. “This provides us with the ultimate flexibility and scalability.”

Enhancing Content Creation From the Cloud

Taylor James’s digital artists require access to graphics and compute-intensive applications for rendering and creative production, such as Autodesk Maya, Arnold, 3ds Max and Foundry Nuke, many of which are now accelerated by NVIDIA RTX technology.

These artists also use real-time rendering with apps like Maxon Cinema 4D and Redshift, and produce high-resolution automotive rendering for online car configurators with Unreal Engine and Chaos V-Ray.

Taylor James relied on NVIDIA GPU-accelerated physical workstations in the onsite environment, so when it came time to move to AWS, the firm selected virtual workstation instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX technology.

NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstations come with all the benefits of RTX technology, including real-time ray tracing, AI, rasterization and simulation.

With NVIDIA RTX, artists realize the dream of real-time cinematic-quality rendering of photorealistic environments with perfectly accurate shadows, reflections and refractions, so that they can create amazing content faster than ever.

“Our designers and artists are masters at creating the most compelling, powerful storytelling that breaks the boundaries of visual production and provides transformative experiences to our audience,” Knowles said. “We require the most powerful accelerated virtual workstation technology, which can only be provided by NVIDIA.”

NVIDIA RTX also brings the power of AI to visual computing, which dramatically accelerates creativity by automating repetitive tasks, enabling all-new creative assistants and optimizing compute-intensive processes.

Artists also get immediate access to additional resources — like augmented and virtual reality tools with NVIDIA CloudXR, as well as IT support to spin up new virtual workstations tailored to specific tasks in a matter of minutes.

Learn more about NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstations, and explore how NVIDIA is helping professionals tackle the most complex computing challenges.

Bill Kish founded Ruckus Wireless two decades ago to make Wi-Fi networking easier. Now, he’s doing the same for computer vision in industrial AI.

In 2015, Kish started Cogniac, a company that offers a self-service computer vision platform and development support.

Like in the early days of Wi-Fi deployment, the rollout of AI is challenging, he said. Cogniac’s answer is to offer companies a fast track to building datasets on their own for models by scanning parts and equipment, using its no-code AI platform.

No-code AI platforms enable people to work with visual tools and user interfaces — for labeling data, for example — to help develop applications without any programming skill required.

It’s a strategy that’s working. Cogniac customers include Ford, freight giant BNSF Railway and tractor maker Doosan Bobcat. The startup turbocharges these businesses with NVIDIA GPUs for all training and inference.

Cogniac, based in Silicon Valley, recently landed a $20 million Series B investment. The company is an NVIDIA Metropolis partner and a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program that offers go-to-market support, expertise and technology for AI, data science and HPC startups. NVIDIA Metropolis is an application framework that makes it easier for developers to combine video cameras and sensors with AI-enabled video analytics.

BNSF Spots Railroad Damages

North America’s largest freight railway network, BNSF Railway has more than 32,000 miles of track in 28 U.S. states and more than 8,000 locomotives, a massive challenge for keeping up with inspections. BNSF relies on Cogniac to build models for inspections of train tracks, train wheels and other parts.

Cogniac enables BNSF to use mobile devices to gather images of defects that can be automatically fed into models. BNSF has about 200 convolutional neural networks in production and several times that under development with Cogniac, said Kish. They’re helping the railway look for missing cotter pins and bolts on cars, tankers that have been left open and hundreds of other safety-related inspections.

Using GPUs onboard trains, Cogniac’s AI enables ongoing inspections of railways to detect broken rails. It also helps prioritize maintenance. Previously, inspections required closing down tracks for about a day to scrutinize sections of it, he said.

“It’s a huge win for the railways to be able to inspect their assets as a part of their ongoing operations,” said Kish.

Ford Detects Sheet Metal Defects

Ford relies on Cogniac for real-time inspections of sheet metal used in F-150 trucks, the best-selling vehicle in North America. Body panels and inner door panels are made of stamped aluminum sheet metal that is pressed into different shapes using a stamping tool.

But those stamped panels can sometimes have defects such as small splits that need to be detected before installation into vehicles.

“Our edge computing is processing gigapixels using dozens of cameras to capture the contours of the surfaces, enabled by NVIDIA GPUs,” said Kish.

Doosan Bobcat Bulldozes Errors

Doosan Bobcat, a Korean maker of compact tractors, was having a lot of missing parts in the build kits it sent out for tractor orders.Those parts kits are built in Minnesota and then sent to North Dakota for assembly. Missing parts were a big problem that stalled output.

But now the tractor giant is aided by Cogniac’s vision pipelines to monitor parts kits the company puts together for building different configurations of its Bobcat tractors.

Before Cogniac, one-third of the kits that Doosan Bobcat put together for building tractors were incomplete or incorrect. Since implementing Cogniac, kit errors are now one out of 20,000, according to Doosan Bobcat.

“Chances are that there are going to be parts that are missing or wrong,” said Kish. “It’s money that’s not going out the door.”

GeForce NOW is charging into the new year at full force.

This GFN Thursday comes with the news that Genshin Impact, the popular open-world action role-playing game, will be coming to the cloud this year, arriving in a limited beta.

Plus, this year’s CES announcements were packed with news for GeForce NOW. Battlefield 4: Premium Edition and Battlefield V: Definitive Edition join the exhilarating collection of Electronic Arts titles streaming from the cloud. Plus, a GeForce NOW promotion is available for AT&T 5G customers, and GeForce NOW will be streaming on Samsung TVs later this year.

And, as always, for the first GFN Thursday of the month, we’ve got the list of new games joining the GeForce NOW library. In January, eight titles are joining the cloud, with two ready to start streaming this week.

Genshin Impact Coming to GeForce NOW

Get ready for an epic fantasy adventure, Traveler. Genshin Impact is coming to GeForce NOW in a limited beta for GeForce NOW users on Windows PCs. To learn if you have access to the beta, members with a miHoYo account can search for Genshin Impact in the GeForce NOW Windows app to see if the beta is available.

You are a traveler from another world, stranded in the mysterious and fantastic land of Teyvat. Embark on a journey to reunite with your lost sibling and explore the seven districts, each presided over by seven elemental gods known as the Archons.

Manipulate and master the various elements to defeat enemies and solve challenging puzzles. Meet the inhabitants of Teyvat and build up your party from over 40 playable characters — with more to come — each with unique abilities, stories, personalities and combat styles.

Experience an immersive campaign, charge head-on into battles solo or invite friends to join your adventures in a vast magical world.

ICYMI: GeForce NOW Announcements From CES

Members can now play Battlefield 4: Premium Edition to embrace unrivaled destruction and experience the ultimate war in Battlefield V: Definitive Edition, streaming from the cloud.

These new additions will join the existing EA catalog available to GeForce NOW members, which includes the massively popular, high-speed hero shooter Apex Legends, already streamed by more than 1 million members.

For the mobile gamer, AT&T and NVIDIA have joined forces as collaborators in 5G technical innovation to deliver one of the world’s best gaming experiences. To celebrate, a special promotion for certain AT&T 5G subscribers is ongoing.

Going from the small screen to the big screen, look for GeForce NOW to arrive on select Samsung TVs later this year.

Our CES blog has more information on these announcements.

Joining in January

A new month (and a whole new year) means a new batch of games. 2022 kicks off with eight new titles coming throughout January.

Coming to GeForce NOW on January 20th is Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction. Join millions of players in the Rainbow Six universe. Go it alone or in a squad of three in thrilling co-op gameplay. Pick from 18 unique Operators and enter the containment zone to take on the ever-evolving, lethal alien threat known as the Archaens.

Gear up for two games arriving this week:

• Battlefield 4: Premium Edition (Steam and Origin)
• Battlefield V: Definitive Edition (Steam and Origin)

Also coming in January:

• The Anacrusis (New release on Steam, Jan. 13)
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction (New release on Ubisoft Connect, Jan. 20)
• Mortal Online 2 (Early access on Steam)
• Ready or Not (Early access on Steam)
• Fly Corp (Steam)
• Garfield Kart – Furious Racing (Steam)

We make every effort to launch games on GeForce NOW as close to their release as possible, but, in some instances, games may not be available immediately.

More From December

On top of the games announced in December, some extra games made it to the cloud last month — including some of Epic Games Store’s 15 days of free games promotion. Check out these additions:

• Anno 1404 History Edition (Ubisoft Connect)
• The Crackpet Show (Steam)
• Inscryption (Steam and Epic Games Store)
• Moving Out (Epic Games Store)
• NARAKA: BLADEPOINT (Epic Games Store)
• One Hand Clapping (Steam and Epic Games Store)
• Prison Architect (Epic Games Store)
• Salt and Sanctuary (Epic Games Store)
• Second Extinction (Epic Games Store)

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

Autonomous vehicles are born in the data center, which is why NVIDIA and Deloitte are delivering a strong foundation for developers to deploy robust self-driving technology.

At CES this week, the companies detailed their collaboration, which is aimed at easing the biggest pain points in AV development. Deloitte, a leading global consulting firm, is pairing with NVIDIA to offer a range of services for data generation, collection, ingestion, curation, labeling and deep neural network (DNN) training with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD.

Building AVs requires massive amounts of data. A fleet of 50 test vehicles driving six hours a day generates 1.6 petabytes daily — if all that data were stored on standard 1GB flash drives, they’d cover more than 100 football fields. Yet that isn’t enough.

On top of this collected data, AV training and validation requires data from rare and dangerous scenarios that the vehicle may encounter, but could be difficult to come across in standard data gathering. That’s where simulated data comes in.

NVIDIA DGX systems and advanced training tools enable streamlined, large-scale DNN training and optimization. Using the power of GPUs and AI, developers can seamlessly collect and curate data to comprehensively train DNNs for autonomous vehicle perception, planning, driving and more.

Developers can also train and test these DNNs in simulation with NVIDIA DRIVE Sim, a physically accurate, cloud-based simulation platform. It taps into NVIDIA’s core technologies — including NVIDIA RTX, Omniverse and AI — to deliver a wide range of real-world scenarios for AV development and validation.

DRIVE Sim can generate high-fidelity synthetic data with ground truth using NVIDIA Omniverse Replicator to train the vehicle’s perception systems or test the decision-making processes.

It can also be connected to the AV stack in software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop configurations to validate the complete integrated system.

“The robust AI infrastructure provided by NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD is paving the way for our clients to develop transformative autonomous driving solutions for safer and more efficient transportation,” said Ashok Divakaran, Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Lead at Deloitte.

A Growing Partnership

Deloitte is at the forefront of AI innovation, services and research, including AV development.

In March, it announced the launch of the Deloitte Center for AI Computing, a first-of-its-kind center designed to accelerate the development of innovative AI solutions for its clients.

The center is built on NVIDIA DGX A100 systems to bring together the supercomputing architecture and expertise that Deloitte clients require as they become AI-fueled organizations.

This collaboration now extends to AV development, using robust AI infrastructure to architect solutions for truly intelligent transportation.

NVIDIA DGX POD is the foundation, providing an AI compute infrastructure based on a scalable, tested reference architecture featuring up to eight DGX A100 systems, NVIDIA networking and high-performance storage.

To further scale AV development and speed time to results, customers can choose the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, which includes 20 or more DGX systems plus networking and storage.

With Deloitte’s long-standing work with the automotive industry and investment in AI innovation, combined with the unprecedented compute of NVIDIA DGX systems, developers will have access to the best AV training solutions for truly revolutionary products.

Deloitte’s leadership in AI is paired with a broad and deep set of technical capabilities and services. Among its ranks are more than 5,500 systems integration developers, 2,000 data scientists and 4,500 cybersecurity practitioners. In 2020, Deloitte was named the global leader in worldwide system integration services by the International Data Corporation.

Deloitte also has deep experience with the automotive industry, serving three-quarters of the Fortune 1000 automotive companies.

Streamlined Solutions

With combined experience and cutting-edge technology, NVIDIA and Deloitte are offering robust data center solutions for AV developers, encompassing infrastructure, data management, machine learning operations and synthetic data generation.

These services begin with Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which provides management of the DGX SuperPOD infrastructure in an on-prem or co-location environment. Experts design and set up this AI infrastructure, as well as provide ongoing infra operations, for streamlined and efficient AV development.

With Data-Management-as-a-Service, developers can use tools for data ingestion and curation, enabling scale and automation for DNN training.

NVIDIA and Deloitte can also improve data scientist productivity up to 30 percent with MLOps-as-a-Service. This turnkey solution deploys and supports enterprise-grade MLOps software to train DNNs and accelerate accuracy.

Finally, NVIDIA and Deloitte make it possible to curate specific scenarios for comprehensive DNN training with Synthetic Data Generation-as-a-Service. Developers can take advantage of simulation expertise to generate high-fidelity training data to cover the rare and hazardous situations AVs must be able to handle safely.

Equipped with these invaluable tools, AV developers now have the capability to ease some of the largest bottlenecks in DNN training to deliver safer, more efficient transportation.

What started as Nick Walton’s college hackathon project grew into AI Dungeon, a popular text adventure game with over 1.5 million users.

Walton is the co-founder and CEO of Latitude, a Utah-based startup that uses AI to create unique gaming storylines.

He spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how natural language processing methods can generate infinite open-ended adventure plots for interactive games like AI Dungeon, which draws an average of 150,000 new players each month.

Key Points From This Episode:

• In AI Dungeon, players type in their actions or responses to prompts — for example, “You’re about to enter a world of endless possibilities, where you can do absolutely anything you can imagine … Will you proceed?” — and AI keeps the story going.
• Unlike other text adventure games that use pre-written content, AI Dungeon offers infinite unique possibilities for each storyline, as the AI adapts and responds to almost any user input.
• Users can dive into adventures individually or in multiplayer mode, which allows players with distinct characters to take turns interacting with the AI within the same game session. To kick off the story, they can choose from a list of initial prompts or create custom adventures.

Tweetables:

“There’s something really compelling here in this ability to have stories that can go anywhere.” — Nick Walton [3:30]

In gaming and in the world, AI enables “new experiences that are no longer static and predetermined, but dynamic and alive.” — Nick Walton [7:16]

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Manufacturing and fulfillment centers are profoundly complex. Whenever new earbuds or socks land at your doorstep in hours or a vehicle rolls off an assembly line, a maze of magic happens with AI-driven logistics.

Massive facilities like these are constantly in flux. Robots travel miles of aisles to roll up millions of products to assist teams of moving people. Obstacles are ever present.

Today we’re introducing the Isaac Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) platform to  optimize operational efficiency and accelerate deployment of AMRs. Isaac AMR extends NVIDIA Isaac capabilities for building and deploying robotics applications, bringing mapping, site analytics and fleet optimization onto NVIDIA EGX servers.

Industrial facilities of this type can be as big as city blocks or stadiums. They are constantly reconfigured or scaled up to meet product demands of the moment. Path planning and rerouting for autonomous robots need to move in lockstep.

At industrial scale, even small routing optimizations can save billions of dollars in the $9 trillion logistics industry.

Autonomous mobile robot deployments are estimated to reach 53,000 sites by 2025, up from 9,000 in 2020, according to Interact Analysis. Meanwhile, supply chains strain to keep up with increasing e-commerce amid worker shortages and COVID-19 restrictions.

One hurdle is the ability to rapidly and autonomously develop high-accuracy robot maps. They need to be continuously updated as operations scale or fluctuate. And increasing situational awareness of changing environments for mobile robots and continuously reoptimizing the routes —  all while developing new skill sets through simulation — is paramount to operational efficiency.

Isaac AMR is the result of years of research and product development at NVIDIA. The framework is available on the NVIDIA NGC software hub and within the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, tapping into Metropolis and ReOpt at first, and soon DeepMap and more NVIDIA technologies.

Scaling Operations With Isaac AMR

The AI and computing challenges of autonomous mobile robots for manufacturing and fulfillment aren’t all that different from those of autonomous vehicles.

Obstacles and people must be avoided. Destinations need to be reached. Thousands of sensors driven by GPU-accelerated algorithms help fleets of autonomous robots solve the traveling salesman problem — finding the shortest path between multiple destinations —  among ever-changing industrial workflows in real time.

The Isaac AMR platform uses NVIDIA Omniverse for creating digital twins of the facility where AMRs will be deployed. NVIDIA Isaac Sim (built on Omniverse) simulates the behavior of robot fleets, people and other machines in the digital twins with high-fidelity physics and perception. It also enables synthetic data generation for training of AI models.

Isaac AMR consists of GPU-accelerated AI technologies and SDKs including DeepMap, ReOpt and Metropolis. These technologies are securely orchestrated and cloud delivered with NVIDIA Fleet Command.

DeepMap Delivers Mapping Advances

NVIDIA’s recent acquisition of DeepMap brings advances in mapping for autonomous vehicles to the AMR industry as well.

AMR deployments can access the DeepMap platform’s cloud-based SDK to help accelerate robot mapping of large facilities from weeks to days, while achieving centimeter-level accuracy.

The DeepMap Update Client enables robot maps to be updated as frequently as necessary, in real time. And the DeepMap SDK delivers layers of intelligence to maps by adding semantic understanding — so robots can identify the objects pixels represent and know if they can move one way or not. It’s also capable of addressing both indoor and outdoor map building.

As part of the Isaac AMR platform, NVIDIA DeepMap integrates with other components, such as Metropolis, ReOpt, Isaac Sim via Omniverse and more.

NVIDIA Metropolis Adds Real-Time Situational Awareness

Mapping doesn’t account for everything in these environments. And the advanced sensors onboard AMRs aren’t always sufficient to ensure safe and efficient operation.

The NVIDIA Metropolis video analytics platform meets the need for higher level real-time “outside-in” perception by providing access to cameras and sensors deployed all over the factory or warehouse floor.

With Metropolis, AMRs have access to additional layers of situational awareness on the factory floor, enabling them to avoid high-congestion areas, eliminating blind spots and enhanced visibility of both people and other AMRs. In addition, Metropolis’s pre-trained models provide a head start in customizing for site-specific needs.

ReOpt Libraries Transform Logistics 

NVIDIA ReOpt AI software libraries can be used to optimize vehicle route planning and logistics in real time, which can be applied to fleets of AMRs.

Many factors need to be considered in deciding the optimal AMR fleet size to be deployed for large, complex environments. Robot speeds, battery life, transport size and weight, and facilities layout all factor in.

Companies can simulate (using Isaac Sim) multiple AMR interactions with NVIDIA ReOpt. These can happen quickly and accurately in digital twins of environments such as warehouses. And they can be implemented before deploying robots in production as situations change, saving time and money.

And, once deployed, routes have to be continuously re-optimized to deliver the most operational efficiency. NVIDIA ReOpt provides for dynamic reoptimization of routes to a fleet of heterogeneous AMRs based on a number of constraints.

Deploying AMRs Into Production

Available on NVIDIA EGX servers, the Isaac AMR platform enhances the development of AI-driven logistics by providing a complete path to build industrial and human-robot simulations as well as route optimizations.

Isaac AMR Platform is built to be enterprise class and cloud ready. The NVIDIA Technologies presented as part of the Isaac AMR platform can be securely deployed and managed on EGX servers with NVIDIA Fleet Command.

Check out the latest developments on Omniverse, Metropolis, DeepMap and ReOpt.

Learn more about the Isaac Robotics Platform and use the contact us form on the portal if you have any questions. 

Putting the power of graphics and AI at the fingertips of more users than ever, NVIDIA announced today new laptops and autonomous vehicles using GeForce RTX and NVIDIA AI platforms and expanded reach for GeForce NOW cloud gaming across Samsung TVs and the AT&T network.

A virtual address prior to CES showed next-gen games, new tools for creating virtual worlds, and AI-powered vehicles — all accelerated by NVIDIA technologies.

160-Plus Portable Powerhouses

“Ray tracing and AI are defining the next generation of content,” said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of NVIDIA’s GeForce business, announcing more than 160 thin-and-light laptops using RTX 30 Series GPUs in a smorgasbord of mobile designs.

They will serve 3 billion gamers and tens of millions of content creators worldwide, who are increasingly turning to portable PCs.

Many of the systems will pack a new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU, the first time the flagship 80 Ti class comes to mobile PCs. It sports 16GB of the fastest ever GDDR6 memory in a laptop and delivers higher performance than the desktop TITAN RTX, with prices starting at $2,499.

More will light up with the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti laptop GPU, the newest member of our fastest-growing class of GPUs. It can drive displays at 100 frames/second with 1,440-pixel resolution, at prices starting at $1,499.

Laptops with the new GPUs will be available starting Feb. 1. They bring a fourth generation of Max-Q Technologies, a systems design approach that enables the thinnest, lightest, quietest gaming laptops.

The latest Max-Q applies AI to optimally balance GPU/CPU power use, battery discharge, image quality and frame rates. Laptops running it can provide up to 70 percent more battery life while delivering more performance.

Mainstream and Monster GPUs

Fisher also announced the GeForce RTX 3050, which brings ray tracing and accelerated AI to mainstream desktops.

The GPU lets mass market PCs run the latest games at 60 frames per second, thanks to graphics and AI cores in its NVIDIA Ampere architecture.

The RTX 3050 sports 8GB of GDDR6 memory. The card will be available from partners worldwide on Jan. 27 starting at $249.

“RTX is the new standard, and the GeForce RTX 3050 makes it more accessible than ever,” said Fisher, showing a “monster” RTX 3090 Ti (pictured below) also in the wings.

The RTX 3090 Ti will pack 24GB of GDDR6X running at 21 Gbit/s, the fastest memory ever. The GPU will crank out 40 teraflops for shaders, 78 teraflops for ray tracing and a whopping 320 teraflops of AI muscle. More details will be coming later this month.

New Initiatives with AT&T, Samsung

Giving high-performance mobile gaming new wings, AT&T and NVIDIA are working together to provide customers an optimized experience. And AT&T customers are getting a special offer to enjoy NVIDIA GeForce NOW on 5G.

“Starting today, AT&T customers with a 5G device on a qualifying plan, can get a six-month GeForce NOW Priority Membership at no charge,” said Fisher.

For its part, Samsung will offer NVIDIA’s cloud gaming service on its smart TVs through the Samsung Gaming Hub around midyear.

It’s the latest move to bring GeForce NOW to the living room. In November, LG showed a beta version of the service on its 2021 WebOS smart TVs.

As for games, GeForce NOW continues to expand support for the Electronic Arts catalog, adding Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 5 to GeForce NOW’s online library of more than 1,100 PC games played by 15 million subscribers.

Heart-Pounding RTX and Reflex Games

Speaking of new games, NVIDIA announced 10 new RTX games.

Fisher showed clips from four upcoming titles that this year will support RTX, DLSS — NVIDIA’s AI-powered graphics enhancing technology — or both.

Escape From Tarkov and Rainbow Six Extraction are adding DLSS, while The Day Before and Dying Light 2 Stay Human are adding both DLSS and ray tracing.

In addition, seven new titles support NVIDIA Reflex for low-latency gameplay. They include Sony’s God of War, Rainbow Six Extraction and iRacing, taking Reflex into the world’s premier online racing simulator.

And we’re raising the bar in esports. A new class of 27-inch esports displays with 1440-pixel resolution and G-SYNC at up to 360 Hz refresh rates will be available soon from AOC, ASUS, MSI and ViewSonic.

Building 3D Virtual Worlds

For the 45 million professionals who create games, movies and more, Fisher described tools transforming their workflows.

“We are at the dawn of the next digital frontier. Interconnected 3D virtual worlds … with shops, homes, people, robots, factories, museums … will be built by an expanding number of creators, collaborating across the globe,” he said.

NVIDIA Omniverse, the powerful platform for artists to collaborate and accelerate 3D work, remains free and is now generally available for GeForce and NVIDIA RTX Studio creators.

Omniverse uses Pixar’s open-standard Universal Scene Description (USD) to connect tools from more than 40 software development partners into a single 3D design platform. That lets creators across the globe collaborate in Omniverse on shared 3D workflows.

“This is the future of 3D content creation and how virtual worlds will be built,” Fisher said.

He detailed new capabilities in Omniverse, including:

• Omniverse Nucleus Cloud, a one-click-to-collaborate 3D scene sharing feature, now in early access
• Updates to Omniverse Audio2Face, an AI-enabled app that animates a 3D face based on an audio track, including direct export to Epic’s MetaHuman for creating realistic characters
• New assets from Mechwarrior 5 and Shadow Warrior 3 added to the Omniverse Machinima library
• And a wealth of free digital assets now available in the Omniverse launcher from leading 3D marketplaces.

In addition, we’ve upgraded NVIDIA Canvas, our Studio app that converts brushstrokes into photorealistic images. Available free to download here, it now supports 4x the resolution and new materials like flowers and bushes thanks to the efforts of NVIDIA researchers who developed GauGAN2.

It’s part of NVIDIA Studio’s broad and deep software stack, which accelerates more than 200 of the industry’s top creative applications.

All that software is available in systems as svelte as the Razer Blade 14, a new ultraportable with an RTX 3080 Ti.

“I feel like I can go anywhere with it and still am able to produce the quality artwork that I could do at home,” said a 3D artist who took it on a test drive and shared his experience in the special address.

Taking AI to the Street

In autonomous cars and trucks — another hot topic at CES — NVIDIA announced more companies adopting its open DRIVE Hyperion platform that includes a high-performance computer and sensor architecture meeting the safety requirements of fully autonomous vehicles.

The latest generation DRIVE Hyperion 8 is designed with redundant NVIDIA DRIVE Orin systems-on-a-chip, 12 state-of-the-art surround cameras, nine radar, 12 ultrasonics, one front-facing lidar and three interior-sensing cameras. It’s architected to be functionally safe, so that if one computer or sensor fails, there is a back up available to ensure that the AV can drive its passengers to a safe place.

Electric vehicle makers such as Volvo-backed Polestar and EV companies in China, including NIO, Xpeng, Li Auto, R Auto and IM Motors have all adopted DRIVE Hyperion.

“These new electric cars will get better and better over time with each over-the-air update,” said Ali Kani, vice president and general manager of NVIDIA’s automotive business.

“Such companies can benefit from new business models that are software driven,” he added.

Robotaxi services like Cruise, Zoox and DiDi and trucking services like Volvo, Navistar and Plus are also embracing DRIVE Hyperion.

Autonomous trucking company TuSimple announced at CES that it will build its new platform on NVIDIA DRIVE Orin. It’s working with leading delivery companies such as UPS, Navistar and Penske, and its technology has already improved arrival times for long-haul routes of the U.S. Postal Service.

Such vehicles will help fill an estimated shortage of more than 140,000 drivers by 2027 in the U.S. alone.

In addition, five leading automotive suppliers — Desay, Flex, Quanta, Valeo and ZF — now support DRIVE Hyperion.

Kani ended the session with a demo of NVIDIA DRIVE Concierge.

An always-on, digital assistant for drivers, it’s one example of helpful agents created with NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar using the company’s speech AI, computer vision, natural language understanding, recommendation engines and simulation technologies.

DRIVE Concierge is the latest addition to NVIDIA’s rich real-time, AI-based software stack for autonomous vehicles. The end-to-end solution also includes code to train AI models in the cloud and run complex simulations in data centers to safely test and validate an entire AV system.

“From AI in the car to AI in the cloud, NVIDIA is paving the way to safer and more efficient transportation,” said Kani.

For more news, check out our CES page and watch the full special address below.