Nvidia Launches Omniverse Cloud to Accelerate Metaverse App Development

Nvidia is moving to bring development of “metaverse” applications to the mainstream with its launch of Omniverse Cloud. The collection of cloud services, revealed on Tuesday at Nvidia’s annual GTC developer’s conference, is the company’s first SaaS offering.

Omniverse Cloud services are designed for developers to design metaverse applications and users to utilize them on any device. Nvidia describes the metaverse as a progression of the internet enhanced by 3-D that simulates environments, structures and people. Driving the metaverse are real-time workflows of 3-D digital wins, virtual replicas of structures, environments and individuals.

Nvidia is pushing the Universal Scene Description (USD) language as a de facto standard for sharing 3-D graphics and data. In his opening GTC keynote, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang explained why that’s important.

“Today’s internet connects websites described in HTML and viewed through a browser, the Metaverse, the 3-D internet, connects virtual 3-D worlds described in USD and viewed through a simulation engine,” Huang (pictured above) said. “Omniverse is a platform for building and operating metaverse applications. Omniverse is useful wherever digital and physical worlds meet.”

The launch of Omniverse Cloud aims to broaden the reach of Nvidia’s Omniverse Enterprise platform. According to Nvidia, it will let more developers build and share 3-D workflows without requiring a GPU-powered client.

SaaS-Based Tools

Nvidia’s Omniverse Cloud services includes specific SaaS-based tools for developers of robotics to train, simulate and deploy AI-capable machines. It includes tools for engineers designing autonomous vehicles to generate telemetry such as sensor data, traffic and weather simulations.

“Nvidia Omniverse cloud is an infrastructure as a service that connects Omniverse applications running in the cloud on prem or on a device,” Huang said.

The initial launch of Omniverse Cloud consists of six services:

Three of the services – Omniverse Farm, Replicator and Isaac Sim containers – are available on Nvidia’s GPU Cloud (NGC). NGU is Nvidia’s suite of managed cloud services consisting of AI solutions. Developers can provision the new Omniverse Farm, Replicator and Isaac Sim for self-service deployment on AWS using Amazon EC2 G5 instances with Nvidia A10G Tensor Core GPUs.

Alternatively, developers can deploy select self-service simulators, modelers and data-generation tools on AWS with Amazon EC2 G5 instances with Nvidia A10G Tensor Core GPUs. Nvidia is also offering Omniverse Cloud as managed services by those applying for early access.

First Omniverse Cloud Implementations

Among the first customers using Omniverse Cloud  are RIMAC Group, WPP and Siemens. WPP, the global conglomerate of advertising and marketing agencies, is the first to launch auto marketing services on Omniverse Cloud. Nvidia said WPP is using Omniverse cloud to provide custom 3-D content to its automotive clients.

“This includes creating programmatic contact content that is more personalized, and perfectly photo real content of your virtual sets, which will save automotive companies an order of magnitude and costs,” said Nvidia Omniverse VP Richard Kerris during a briefing with media and analysts.

Advancing Digital Twin Simulation

Nvidia also announced the second version of Nvidia OVX, its GPU architecture designed with advanced network capabilities. Nvidia designed OVX to provide real-time graphics and digital twin simulations within its Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise platform.

The new OVX uses Nvidia’s latest L40 GPUs, based on its enhanced GPU architecture, designed for creating industrial digital twins. Besides the new L40 GPUs, Nvidia said OVX will include three of its ConnectX-7 SmartNIC network adapters to provide up to 400 Gbps network throughput. For higher performance workloads or those which require more scale, customers can deploy the servers in OVX POD and SuperPOD configurations with Nvidia’s Spectrum-3 Ethernet network interface.

“OVX is the Omniverse computer, an ideal way to scale out metaverse applications,” Huang said. Kerris added: “The new OVX systems are designed to build virtual worlds using leading 3-D software applications from our many software partners and to be able to operate immersive digital twin simulations.”

BMW and Jaguar Land Rover are the first customers Nvidia revealed that have receive OVX systems. According to Nvidia, Inspur, Lenovo and Supermicro will ship the first OVX servers in early 2023. Gigabyte, H3C and QCT will follow.