Nvidia Corporation’s 2023 GTC conference was awash with the buzzwords du jour, from artificial intelligence and large-language modelling to metaverse and digital twins.
But where some firms have played catch up to the AI groundswell sweeping the technology sector, Nvidia has been leading the way with major multinational strategic tie-ups at the cutting edge.
One of the most eye-catching GTC announcements was BMW’s rollout of Nvidia’s Omniverse technology deck across nearly three dozen factories worldwide, including what Omniverse vice president Richard Kerris called the “world’s first entire virtual-first factory” in Debrecen, Hungary.
As a virtual-first factory, engineers will start work in Debrecen two years before the physical space is completed in 2025.
Factory layout, robot training and sales and marketing will all start virtually before moving to the physical world.
This is made possible by the ‘digital-twin’ concept at the core of Omniverse’s enterprise-level metaverse platform.
“This has never been done before,” said Kerris. “This is really a milestone in the automotive industry and one that we think we're going to see throughout all the different auto manufacturers.”
What exactly is a digital twin?
The digital twin is one of the key concepts underpinning enterprise-level metaverse technology.
At the highest concept, a digital twin replica of a city would perfectly render each street, city block, traffic light system, traffic flow trends, pedestrian habits and even weather patterns in a three-dimensional digital space.
A 1:1 digital city twin would allow city planners to model and test real-world simulations to create more efficient policies and regulations.
BMW rolls out virtual automobile factory using Nvidia Omniverse – Source: Nvidia
In the case of BMW’s digital-first Debrecen factory made with Nvidia’s Omniverse platform, the automotive group will be able to optimise layouts, robotics and logistics systems years before production actually starts.
“This is transformative — we can design, build and test completely in a virtual world,” said BMW Group board member Milan Nedeljković.
Cutting the digital ribbon at this year’s GTC conference, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang stated: “We are excited and incredibly proud of the progress BMW has made with Omniverse.
“The partnership will continue to push the frontiers of virtual integration and virtual tooling for the next generation of smart-connected factories around the world.”
Nvidia pitches AI to medical sector
Automobile manufacturing was undoubtedly a focal point at GTC 2023, but Nvidia’s BioNeMo drug discovery service for customising and running generative AI for drug discovery undoubtedly captured guests’ attention too.
BioNeMo’s suite of pre-trained and optimised open-source models provides drug discovery teams with easy access to the early drug discovery process, from 3D structure prediction to molecular docking.
Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN), a world leader in antibody discovery and development, is an early adopter of BioNeMo.
Post-training, Amgen experienced up to a 100-times speedup with optimised structure prediction models used to generate protein structures.
Medtronic (NYSE:MDT), the world leader in medical devices, has also announced its partnership with Nvidia to build an AI platform for medical devices.
cuLitho ‘breakthrough’
Vivek Singh, vice president of Nvidia’s Advanced Technology Group, has hailed a “breakthrough” in computational lithography, the process of creating chip designs on a computer and physically printing them onto silicon.
Nvidia is calling the breakthrough cuLitho, which Nvidia says can deliver a performance leap of up to 40 times the current lithography process.
cuLitho “is a game-changer for chipmakers” Singh, stating that 500 Hopper GPU cards incorporating cuLitho tech “can now do the work of 40,000 CPU systems, while using only one-eighth the space and only one-ninth the power”.
Moreover, “a chip design that used to take two weeks to process can now be processed overnight”.
The new Nvidia cuLitho software library algorithms are already being integrated by TSMC, the world’s leading semiconductor foundry.
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