NVIDIA Expands Omniverse Cloud for Industrial Applications

At the GTC conference in March, NVIDIA announced that NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud, a platform-as-a-service that enables companies to unify digitalization across their core product and business processes, is now available to select enterprises.

NVIDIA has selected Microsoft Azure as the first cloud service provider for Omniverse Cloud, giving enterprises access to the full-stack suite of Omniverse software applications and NVIDIA OVX infrastructure, with the scale and security of Azure cloud services, the company says.

The new subscription offering for Omniverse Cloud on Azure will make it easier for automotive teams — from design and engineering to smart factory to marketing — to digitalize their workflows, NVIDIA says.

“Every manufactured object, from massive physical facilities to handheld consumer goods, will someday have a digital twin, created to build, operate and optimize the object,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud is the digital-to-physical operating system for industrial digitalization, arriving just in time for the trillions of dollars of new EV, battery and chip factories that are being built.”

Through Omniverse Cloud, NVIDIA and Microsoft provide customers a full-stack cloud environment and platform capabilities to design, develop, deploy and manage industrial metaverse applications. Omniverse Cloud also connects with the products that customers use from NVIDIA’s partner ecosystem.

Powered by NVIDIA OVX computing systems, Omniverse Cloud enables enterprise developers to customize foundation applications that are included with the platform-as-a-service:

• Omniverse USD Composer (formerly Omniverse Create) — to assemble applications based on the Universal Scene Description (USD) framework, compose industrial virtual worlds and create digital twins.
• Omniverse USD-GDN Publisher — to publish interactive USD applications such as product configurators to the NVIDIA Graphics Delivery Network, enabling streaming of advanced 3D experiences to any device, anywhere.
• NVIDIA Isaac Sim — to train and simulate AI-based robots.
• NVIDIA DRIVE Sim — to test and validate autonomous vehicles.
• Omniverse Replicator — to generate 3D synthetic data to accelerate the training and accuracy of computer vision AI networks.

A number of customers, including BMW Group, Geely Lotus and Jaguar Land Rover, are already leveraging Omniverse Enterprise for their development workflows.

BMW Group, which was the first carmaker to adopt Omniverse to build a fully digitalized smart factory, also announced that it will launch the current Omniverse Enterprise platform across its production network worldwide.

“NVIDIA Omniverse has given us an unprecedented ability to design, build and test complex manufacturing systems, which means we can plan and optimize a next-generation factory completely virtually before we build it in the physical world,” said Milan Nedeljković, board member for production at BMW AG. “This will save us time and resources, increase our sustainability efforts and improve operational efficiencies.”

Geely Lotus is adopting Omniverse Enterprise to build digital twins of factories to optimize manufacturing processes.

Jaguar Land Rover is using Omniverse to generate synthetic data to train AI models, as well as validate perception and control algorithms through real-world driving scenarios. The vehicle maker has integrated Omniverse with its state-of-the-art vehicle dynamics models, virtual electronic control units, virtual automotive networks and cloud infrastructure, enabling teams to rapidly iterate software concepts.

Omniverse Cloud, powered by NVIDIA OVX computing systems, will be available starting with Microsoft Azure in the second half of the year.

Omniverse Cloud-based services will also be available from a network of leading service providers including WPP, the world’s largest marketing and communications company, which is building services to deliver sustainable and automated content supply chains for major brands worldwide.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.