Blueprint for Interactive Virtual Wind Tunnels Enables Unprecedented Computer-Aided Engineering Exploration for Altair, Ansys, Cadence, Siemens and More
SC24 — NVIDIA today announced an NVIDIA Omniverse™ Blueprint that enables industry software developers to help their computer-aided engineering (CAE) customers in aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, energy and other industries create digital twins with real-time interactivity.
Software developers such as Altair, Ansys, Cadence and Siemens can use the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for real-time computer-aided engineering digital twins to help their customers drive down development costs and energy usage while getting to market faster. The blueprint is a reference workflow that includes NVIDIA acceleration libraries, physics-AI frameworks and interactive physically based rendering to achieve 1,200x faster simulations and real-time visualization.
“We built Omniverse so that everything can have a digital twin,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Omniverse Blueprints are reference pipelines that connect NVIDIA Omniverse with AI technologies, enabling leading CAE software developers to build groundbreaking digital twin workflows that will transform industrial digitalization, from design and manufacturing to operations, for the world’s largest industries.”
One of the first applications of the blueprint is computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, a critical step to virtually explore, test and refine the designs of cars, airplanes, ships and many other products. Traditional engineering workflows — from physics simulation to visualization and design optimization — can take weeks or even months to complete.
In an industry first, NVIDIA and Luminary Cloud are demonstrating at SC24 a virtual wind tunnel that allows users to simulate and visualize fluid dynamics at real-time, interactive speeds, even when changing the vehicle model inside the tunnel.
Unifying Three Pillars of NVIDIA Technology for Developers
Building a real-time physics digital twin requires two fundamental capabilities: real-time physics solver performance and real-time visualization of large-scale datasets.
The Omniverse Blueprint achieves these by bringing together NVIDIA CUDA-X™ libraries to accelerate the solvers, the NVIDIA Modulus physics-AI framework to train and deploy models to generate flow fields, and NVIDIA Omniverse application programming interfaces for 3D data interoperability and real-time RTX-enabled visualization.
Developers can integrate the blueprint as individual elements or in its entirety into their existing tools.
Ecosystem Uses NVIDIA Blueprint to Advance Simulations
Ansys is the first to adopt the Omniverse Blueprint, applying it to Ansys Fluent fluid simulation software to enable accelerated CFD simulation.
Ansys ran Fluent at the Texas Advanced Computing Center on 320 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. A 2.5-billion-cell automotive simulation was completed in just over six hours, which would have taken nearly a month running on 2,048 x86 CPU cores, significantly enhancing the feasibility of overnight high-fidelity CFD analyses and establishing a new industry benchmark.
“By integrating NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint with Ansys software, we’re enabling our customers to tackle increasingly complex and detailed simulations more quickly and accurately,” said Ajei Gopal, president and CEO of Ansys. “Our collaboration is pushing the boundaries of engineering and design across multiple industries.”
Luminary Cloud is also adopting the blueprint. The company’s new simulation AI model, built on NVIDIA Modulus, learned the relationships between airflow fields and car geometry based on training data generated from its GPU-accelerated CFD solver. The model runs simulations orders of magnitude faster than the solver itself, enabling real-time aerodynamic flow simulation that is visualized using Omniverse APIs.
Altair, Beyond Math, Cadence, Hexagon, Neural Concept, Siemens, SimScale and Trane Technologies are also exploring adoption of the Omniverse Blueprint into their own applications.
The Omniverse Blueprint can be run on all leading cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It is also available on NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud.
Rescale, a cloud-based platform that helps organizations accelerate scientific and engineering breakthroughs, is using the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint to enable organizations to train and deploy custom AI models in just a few clicks.
The Rescale platform automates the full application-to-hardware stack and can be run across any cloud service provider. Organizations can generate training data using any simulation solver; prepare, train and deploy the AI models; run inference predictions; and visualize and optimize models.
Availability
Companies interested in learning more about the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for real-time computer-aided engineering digital twins can sign up for early access.