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NVIDIA Isaac Sim on Omniverse available in Open Beta

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The new Isaac simulation engine creates good photorealistic environments, and streamlines synthetic data generation and domain randomization to build ground-truth datasets to train robots in applications from logistics and warehouses to factories of the future.

Omniverse is the underlying foundation for NVIDIA’s simulators, including the Isaac platform — which now includes several new features. Discover the next level in simulation capabilities for robots with NVIDIA Isaac Sim open beta, available now.

Built on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, Isaac Sim is a robotics simulation application and synthetic data generation tool. It allows roboticists to train and test their robots more efficiently by providing a realistic simulation of the robot interacting with compelling environments that can expand coverage beyond what is possible in the real world.

This release of Isaac Sim also adds improved multi-camera support and sensor capabilities, and a PTC OnShape CAD importer to make it easier to bring in 3D assets. These new features will expand the breadth of robots and environments that can be successfully modeled and deployed in every aspect: from design and development of the physical robot, then training the robot, to deploying in a “digital twin” in which the robot is simulated and tested in an accurate and photorealistic virtual environment.

Summary of key new features:
–Multi-Camera Support
–Fisheye Camera with Synthetic Data
–ROS2 Support
–PTC OnShape Importer
–Improved Sensor Support
Ultrasonic Sensor
Force Sensor
Custom Lidar Patterns
–Downloadable from NVIDIA Omniverse Launcher

Isaac Sim sending multi-camera sensor data to Rviz (ROS Visualization Tool)
Controlling the Dofbot Manipulation Robot in Isaac Sim

Isaac Sim enables more robotics simulation
Developers have long seen the benefits of having a powerful simulation environment for testing and training robots. But all too often, the simulators have had shortcomings that limited their adoption. Isaac Sim addresses these drawbacks with the benefits described below.

Realistic Simulation

In order to deliver realistic robotics simulations, Isaac Sim leverages the Omniverse platform’s powerful technologies including advanced GPU-enabled physics simulation with PhysX 5, photorealism with real-time ray and path tracing, and Material Definition Language (MDL) support for physically based rendering.

Modular, Breadth of Applications

Isaac Sim is built to address many of the most common robotics use cases including manipulation, autonomous navigation, and synthetic data generation for training data. Its modular design allows users to easily customize and extend the toolset to accommodate many applications and environments.

Seamless Connectivity and Interoperability

With NVIDIA Omniverse, Isaac Sim benefits from Omniverse Nucleus and Omniverse Connectors, enabling collaborative building, sharing, and importing of environments and robot models in Universal Scene Description (USD). Easily connect the robot’s brain to a virtual world through Isaac SDK and ROS/ROS2 interface, fully-featured Python scripting, plugins for importing robot and environment models.

Synthetic data generation in Isaac Sim bootstraps machine learning

Synthetic Data Generation is an important tool that is increasingly used to train the perception models found in today’s robots. Getting real-world, properly labeled data is a time consuming and costly endeavor. But in the case of robotics, some of the required training data could be too difficult or dangerous to collect in the real world. This is especially true of robots that must operate in close proximity to humans.

Isaac Sim has built-in support for a variety of sensor types that are important in training perception models. These sensors include RGB, depth, bounding boxes, and segmentation.

Ground Truth Synthetic Data with Glass Objects

In the open beta, we have the ability to output synthetic data in the KITTI format. This data can then be used directly with the NVIDIA Transfer Learning Toolkit to enhance model performance with use case-specific data.

Domain Randomization

Domain Randomization varies the parameters that define a simulated scene, such as the lighting, color and texture of materials in the scene. One of the main objectives of domain randomization is to enhance the training of machine learning (ML) models by exposing the neural network to a wide variety of domain parameters in simulation. This will help the model to generalize well when it encounters real world scenarios. In effect, this technique helps teach models what to ignore.

Domain Randomization of a Factory Scene

Isaac Sim supports the randomization of many different attributes that help define a given scene. With these capabilities, the ML engineers can ensure that the synthetic dataset contains sufficient diversity to drive robust model performance.

NVIDIA Isaac Sim

NVIDIA launches Omniverse design collaboration and simulation platform

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NVIDIA announced the coming general availability of NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise, a technology platform that enables global 3D design teams working across multiple software suites to collaborate in real time in a shared virtual space.

NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise makes it possible for 3D production teams, which are often geographically dispersed, to work seamlessly together on complex projects. Rather than requiring in-person meetings or exchanging and iterating on massive files, designers, artists and reviewers can work simultaneously in a virtual world from anywhere, on any device.

NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise has been in early evaluations with design teams at companies like BMW Group, Foster + Partners, and WPP. It follows the launch three months ago of an open beta for individuals.

Said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, “Building on NVIDIA’s entire body of work, Omniverse lets us create and simulate shared virtual 3D worlds that obey the laws of physics. The immediate applications of Omniverse include connecting design teams for remote collaboration to simulating digital twins of factories and robots.”

Omniverse Enterprise includes the NVIDIA Omniverse Nucleus server, which manages the database shared among clients, and NVIDIA Omniverse Connectors, which are plug-ins to industry-leading design applications.

It also includes two end-user applications: NVIDIA Omniverse Create , which accelerates scene composition and allows users in real time to interactively assemble, light, simulate, and render scenes, and NVIDIA Omniverse View, which powers seamless collaborative design and visualization of architectural and engineering projects with photorealistic rendering. NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation (vWS) software, also part of the platform, gives collaborators the freedom to run their graphics- intensive 3D applications from anywhere.

Omniverse Enterprise is tested and optimized for professionals to run on NVIDIA RTX laptops and desktops, and NVIDIA-Certified Systems on the NVIDIA EGX platform. This makes it possible to deploy the tool across organizations of any scale, from small workgroups using local desktops and laptops, to globally distributed teams accessing the data center using various devices.

NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise software is available on a subscription basis and includes NVIDIA’s Enterprise support services. NVIDIA’s partner network of leading computer makers — including ASUS, BOXX Technologies, Cisco, Dell Technologies, HP, Lenovo and Supermicro — are supporting NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise.

NVIDIA
www.nvidia.com

How Real-time Ray Tracing Can Uncover Dangerous Design Flaws

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While today’s sleek skyscrapers filling urban landscapes seem to embody modern and cutting-edge design, it’s often not until after these mammoth structures are built that hidden design flaws rear their ugly heads, sometimes with rather dire consequences.

In one particular case, these consequences included a building that was quite literally melting nearby cars.
London’’s year-old 20 Fenchurch Street tower is a stunner, but the same curved glass that gives the 37-storey tower the nickname, “The Walkie Talkie,” also has a knack for concentrating sunlight.

The result of which is a hot spot that melted part of a nearby black Jaguar XJ and cooked shampoo in a local barber shop. It’ has even been used to fry eggs.

Such “death rays” are growing problem, thanks to a new generation of glass-sheathed buildings with radical computer-designed curves. Those curves reflect — and concentrate — light in ways that have been hard for designers and engineers to predict.

At the recently held GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA’ used the power of its GPUs to demonstrate how London’’s fifth-tallest building came to be known as the “”Fryscraper.”” The reality is that the Walkie Talkie building’’s solar glare could have been worse. If the building’’s curves were altered, even slightly, it could have created a beam of light hot enough to melt lead.

And Iray We Go

Rendering–the process of turning a digital model into an image on a screen–isn’’t new. Neither is ray tracing, which tracks the way beams of light interact with objects in their environment. What’ is new, however, is how the company’s Iray ray tracing technology takes advantage of GPUs to render detailed models in real-time.

Rather than relying on technology that takes hours to create a single, static image, or a snapshot, designers, using Iray, can view digital images as they work. They can see how light interacts with their design over long stretches of time–as the sun moves across the sky at different times of the day and year–rather than just a moment or two.

NVIDIA is developing plug-ins that will integrate this capability into the most popular design tools, putting this capability into the hands of most designers, something that can save time and potentially avoid trouble down the line.

Real-time raytracing can help identify hidden design flaws

I saw for myself the power of real-time raytracing rendering at a Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE event late last year. During one session a fully interactive visualization of a Honda car was shown. The demo didn’t just show a spinning digital prototype–which we’ve all seen before–but showed how a whole section of the vehicle could be “peeled” away in real-time to show specific components, down to the electrical wires and seat springs. It was fascinating.

Technology like this promises to solve a huge number of common design problems as well as some that aren’’t so common.

A new generation of glass-sheathed buildings with radical computer-designed curves have created some unexpected challenges for designers and some unexpected results.
A new generation of glass-sheathed buildings with radical computer-designed curves have created some unexpected challenges for designers and some unexpected results.

The challenges of modeling light

Factoring in the effects of reflected light into design is something that’s traditionally been challenging for designers, and yet today’s highly stylized buildings often require it. Building structures without taking the effects of light can have disastrous results.

Take 20 Fenchurch, for example.– Its glass curves create a spot where the temperature can rise to almost 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The Vdara Hotel, just off the Las Vegas Strip, with –its concave glass facade, creates temperatures by the pool hot enough to melt plastic and have caused guests to get extreme sunburns. Or L.A.’’s extravagant Walt Disney Concert Hall. It heated up nearby condos, driving residents to draw their shades and run air conditioners.

None of this is the work of mad scientists or James Bond-style villains. The structures were created by architects and engineers who lacked the tools to predict how their designs will interact with the world around them.

In the past, modeling reflected light has been a time-consuming procedure that is usually reserved for presentations of near-final designs. Designers build those presentations around specific lighting conditions; they’’re snapshots, not simulations.

NVIDIA's new Iray technology enables designers to model light in ways that were previously not practical.
NVIDIA’s new Iray technology enables designers to model light in ways that were previously not practical.

Quadro M6000 graphics cards deliver the horsepower for high-res visualizations

NVIDIA’s new Iray 2015 rendering technology changes that. When paired with the new Quadro M6000 graphics card, reportedly the world’s most powerful GPU, –Iray 2015 models the way light bounces around a scene as design teams tweak their models.

What makes it even better is that it can be done very quickly. Rather than having to wait hours to create photorealistic images, designers can just add more GPUs to create higher-resolution models in an instant. NVIDIA’s upgraded Quadro Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) features a whopping eight Quadro M6000 GPUs.

Adding the VCA to a data center enables design teams to tap its rendering power when and where it’s needed. Every NVIDIA Iray product will include the ability to stream rendering from machines running its Iray Server software. NVIDIA will make Iray accessible to users with add-ins for popular 3D applications, such as Autodesk’s 3ds Max, Maya, and Revit, McNeel Rhinoceros and Maxon Cinema 4D.

With this new generation of prototyping tools, designers and engineers will no longer have to build detailed physical models or create movies of rendered objects. Instead, designers will be able to see their work in real-time, which can save months or years. And, possibly save a few Jaguars from the next “fry scraper.”

Find more information on all NVIDIA products here.

Barb Schmitz

NVIDIA Introduces Shared Visual Computing Appliance

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As CAD software becomes more and more powerful and resulting models become more complex and large in size, it requires more and more horsepower under the hood of engineering workstations to run effectively. Enter NVIDIA, the somewhat undisputed leader in the 3D graphic cards market.

You could find NVIDIA cards working quietly behind the scenes everywhere in the Partner Pavilion at this year’s SolidWorks World, being that its cards are the most popular among SolidWorks users with approximately 80% of the SolidWorks market.

The most popular of which is the Quadro Pro K2000 cards that sell for only about $400, a small price to pay for significantly increased productivity, right? Need even more power? Upgrade to the company’s K6000 for $4,500, which offers a whopping 12 GB of frame buffer memory and can make even the largest assemblies and photorealistic renderings and animations move in real time.

NVIDIA's Quadro K6000 is the first professional-class GPU to integrate high performance computing capabilities with advanced visualization techniques, transforming modern workflows.
NVIDIA’s Quadro 6000 is the first professional-class GPU to integrate high performance computing capabilities with advanced visualization techniques, transforming modern workflows.

Touted to deliver 5X faster performance over its predecessor, the Quadro K6000 can deliver 1.3 billion triangles per second, shattering previous 3D graphics limitations. For serious data crunching for applications such as CFD, these cards deliver performance gains of 8X. Seeing these high-end cards doing their thing was quite impressive though Andrew Cresci, vertical marketing General Manager of NVIDIA, saved the best for last.

NVIDIA takes on shared, visual computing

Not happy just being the leader in 3D graphics acceleration for the design world, NVIDIA has eyes on harnessing its technology for shared computing. During my briefing with the company, Cresci gave me a sneak peak at the company’s Visual Computing Appliance (VCA). The appliance can be located anywhere–in a data center or a company’s centralized IT center–and can fed graphics to nearly any computing device, including iPads, mobile devices, low-end PCs, etc. It works by compressing graphics from the centralized server-like hub from any distance with no discernible lag, at least that I saw during my demo.

As an editor, I hate to throw around meaningless words, like “cool,” but indeed it was cool. I was able to manipulate a rather large SolidWorks assembly running on a PC in the NVIDIA booth that was being fed from the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, 400 miles away from where we were. You can pretty quickly see the advantage of VCA for engineers and designers. Imagine being able to tap the computing power of a large server running existing software from your iPad or low-end PC.

It’s hard to not see real productivity benefits VCA offers to product developers as companies continue to try to squeeze more value out of existing resources (software and hardware). It’s not cheap; $25K+ for a floating license, but certainly a tech offering we’ll be keeping an eye on in the future. Check it out yourself on the NVIDIA site.

Barb Schmitz

No more CAD workstations?

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Imagine you worked in IT, in a large company, and had to put up with CAD users acting all special, because they needed big computers with lots of memory, and fancy graphics cards.  Pretty irritating, eh?

But what if you could stop buying those machines, and instead give CAD users regular-old PCs?

That’s the promise with the NVIDIA GRID.  It’s a special GPU card designed for workstation virtualization.  Put a stack of powerful servers with these cards in your data center, and your CAD users can get access to all the power they need though their regular desktop or notebook computer.  All they need is an internet connection.

Here’s the NVIDIA press release on the GRID.

displaymedia

NVIDIA GRID Unleashes Graphics For Virtualized Desktops

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Citrix Synergy — NVIDIA today announced that it is unleashing the full graphics potential of enterprise desktop virtualization with the availability of NVIDIA GRID™ vGPU™ integrated into Citrix XenDesktop 7.

NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology addresses a challenge that has grown in recent years with the rise of employees using their own notebooks and portable devices for work. These workers have increasingly relied on desktop virtualization technologies for anytime access to computing resources, but until now this was generally used for the more standard enterprise applications. Performance and compatibility constraints had made it difficult for applications such as building information management (BIM), product-lifecycle management (PLM) and video-photo editing.

Two decades ago hardware-based graphics replaced software emulation. Desktop virtualization solutions stood alone as the only modern computing form without dedicated graphics hardware. As a result, an already busy virtualized CPU limited performance and software emulation hampered application compatibility.

The situation began to improve a year ago with the introduction of the non-virtualized GPU in Citrix XenServer. But efficiency gains were limited because each user still required a dedicated GPU.

With the introduction of new HDX GPU sharing and deep compression techniques in XenDesktop 7, NVIDIA and Citrix customers can immediately take advantage of the hosted-shared form of desktop virtualization to deliver rich, graphics-intensive applications. Using the Microsoft Windows Server RDSH and XenDesktop 7 platform can enable the sharing of GPUs across multiple user sessions.

Furthermore, the combination of Citrix XenServer and NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology allows customers to efficiently share GPUs across multiple virtual machines. This allows businesses to address a broader set of users with their desktop virtualization infrastructure across a spectrum of verticals, including:

  • Architects, engineers and contractors using computer-aided design (CAD) tools, like Autodesk BIM.
  • Manufacturing businesses that want to automate the connection between product design and operations using PLM tools, like Enovia 3DLive, PTC Windchill PLM Connector and SIEMENS Teamcenter software.
  • Digital-content creation workers using video and photo editing tools, like Adobe® Photoshop® software.
  • Health-care specialists using picture archiving and communication system (PACS) applications, like GE Centricity EMR.

Citrix CEO and President Mark Templeton introduced XenDesktop 7 with NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology today in his opening keynote address at the Citrix Synergy 2013 user conference.

“With NVIDIA GRID vGPU, even the most intensive graphics applications can be delivered by XenDesktop 7,” said Bob Schultz, vice president and general manager, Desktops and Applications Group at Citrix. “Now businesses can provide their users with the performance that they expect and need for engineering, design and video applications, while centrally securing and managing valuable intellectual property and sensitive information.”

“For the first time, NVIDIA GRID vGPU gives users of virtualized desktops the performance, stability and compatibility of hardware-accelerated graphics,” said Jeff Brown, vice president and general manager of the GRID business unit at NVIDIA. “Millions of those involved in everything from product design to manufacturing to supply chain management can now enjoy the benefits of desktop and application virtualization with NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology.”

Leading Citrix Resellers Endorse NVIDIA GRID 
M7 Global Partners, a consortium of the top nine Citrix platinum-level IT providers in the U.S., announced its support for NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology. Collectively, the group reaches thousands of clients around the world. M7 customers looking to deploy visually rich applications in businesses of all sizes, healthcare settings and schools have expressed interest in the capabilities of the NVIDIA GRID vGPU.

“I’ve been selling desktop virtualization solutions for 18 years and the single greatest source of pain in that time has been customers who want to centralize the delivery of graphics-intensive applications,” said Mike Strohl, CEO of Entisys Solutions, Inc., Agile360 and founding partner of M7 Global Partners. “The NVIDIA GRID vGPU is a game changer. At Entisys and across M7 we look forward to not only holding the spear, but to being at the tip of it as we bring to market this amazing technology, which our customers have truly been asking for.”

NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology is being shown in NVIDIA’s booth 303 and in the XenServer demonstration area at Citrix Synergy in Anaheim, Calif., through May 24. General availability is expected later this year. More information is available at NVIDIA GRID.

About NVIDIA GRID
The NVIDIA GRID portfolio — comprised of hardware, software and appliances — delivers GPU acceleration from data centers to any user. It includes the NVIDIA GRID VGX platform for enterprises; the NVIDIA GRID Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) for small and medium-size businesses; and the NVIDIA GRID Cloud Gaming Platform for gaming-as-a-service companies. Follow us at @NVIDIAGRID.

About NVIDIA
Since 1993, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) has pioneered the art and science of visual computing. The company’s technologies are transforming a world of displays into a world of interactive discovery — for everyone from gamers to scientists, and consumers to enterprise customers. More information at http://nvidianews.nvidia.com and http://blogs.nvidia.com.

NVIDIA Kepler GPUs are finally here

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nvidia-quadro-keplerIt’s taken awhile, but the new generation of NVIDIA GPU graphics cards are out.

Why does it matter? Well, short of performance issues—and these cards are fast indeed—the Kepler GPU represents a product inflection point for NVIDIA. It’s the “new model” – the presumptive choice among NVIDIA graphics cards for CAD workstations.

Up until now, NVIDIA has been shipping justs a few models of Kepler-based cards. The Lenovo W530 notebook that I’m using to write this post has a Quadro K2000M (the “K” means Kepler, the “M” means mobile), which is their fastest card for 15” class mobile workstations. The high-end K5000 has been out since October.

Here’s a table, listing the range of Kepler-based cards for desktop workstations:

QUADRO
KELPER DESKTOP WORKSTATION SPECIFICATIONS
BOARD FEATURES K5000 K4000 K2000 K2000D K600
Memory
Size		 4GB
GDDR5		 3GB
GDDR5		 2GB
GDDR5		 2GB
GDDR5		 1GB
DDR3
Max
Power		 122W 80W 51W 51W 41W
Power
Connector		 1x
6-pin		 1x
6-pin
Number
of slots		 2 1 1 1 1
Simultaneous
Displays		 4 4 4 4 2
Display
Connectors		 DVI-I
(1)DVI-D (1)

DP 1.2 (2)

 DVI-I
(1)DP 1.2 (2)		 DVI-I
(1)DP 1.2 (2)		 DVI-I
(1)DVI-D (1)

mDP 1.2 (1)

 DVI-I
(1)DP 1.2 (1)
Single
Precision Performance (GFLOPS)		 2168 1244 732 732 336
Price
(MSRP)		 $2,249.00 $1,269.00 $599.00 $599.00 $199.00

You probably want to know which card you should choose, don’t you?

Let me tell you about the extensive comparative benchmark test I ran on the full line of NVIDIA cards. Or not. Instead, of doing that, I called my old friend David Cohn, and asked him what he thought. David regularly does full-on tests and reviews of graphics cards. For example, he reviewed the Quadro K5000 in the January issue of Desktop Engineering, and was duly impressed. Even though it’s the top of the Kepler line, it provides a lot of bang for the buck.

His observations confirmed my experience, which is that most CAD users should choose the mid-range card. In this case, the K2000 (or the K2000D, which comes with different display connectors.)

While the K600 is a perfectly competent card, it is noticeably less responsive in run-of-the-mill CAD use than the K2000. The difference in performance is more than worth the $400 difference in price.

And, while both the K4000 and K5000 are smoking hot cards, you only experience their power when running visualization type applications. The simple shaded models used in day-to-day CAD work just don’t require the capabilities of a high-end GPU.

Of course, all this is a big fat generalization. There are plenty of exceptions—cases where software developers have specifically tuned applications to use GPUs to their full potential.

Here’s how I’d put it: If I were to get a phone call from the brother-in-law of a friend, and he wanted to know what GPU card to buy for his CAD system, I’d tell him to get a  K2000. But, between you and me, when it comes to which card I’d get for my own workstation, the answer is different.  I choose the K5000.  I’ll tell you why in an upcoming post.

NVIDIA www.nvidia.com

CAD at a distance: Using Citrix for workstation virtualization

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Sometimes the conversations you have in the hallway are the most interesting.  Earlier in the year, I was at the Collaboration and Interoperability Conference in Denver, and was chatting with a man who works for Boeing. He mentioned that the company’s main CATIA infrastructure for the 787 Dreamliner is located in Everett, Washington, where their main production line is.  When engineers at the second production line, in North Charleston, South Carolina, need access to CATIA, they use desktop virtualization. They run CATIA on machines in Everett (apparently they have a rack of computers configured just for that purpose there), but view the screen remotely, at their computers in South Carolina.

This didn’t really surprise me. Desktop and application virtualization software has been around awhile. If you’ve ever participated in a GoToMeeting session, or joined in a GoToWebinar session, you’ve seen a form of desktop virtualization.  What surprised me was what this fellow from Boeing said about performance: The engineers in South Carolina actually experienced better CATIA performance than the engineers in Everett. Why? Because the computers they have configured for remote CATIA access are bigger, faster, and have better GPUs than the ones that the local engineers have on their desks.

Is it possible to actually use an average everyday computer to remotely access a CAD machine over the Internet, and get good performance?  Turns out it is.

Citrix, the developer of GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, is one of the major players in the virtualization business. They’ve been collaboration with GPU and computer vendors to develop a series of Design Engineer Virtual Workstation solutions, based on their XenApp and XenDesktop products.

For these solutions to work, they need to provide both high performance, and really good image quality. The key to this is in using GPU based hardware rendering, and a really good codec, to compress the screen output.  Citrix offers three levels of increasing performance: XenDesktop with RemoteFX, XenApp HDX 3D with hardware acceleration for DirectX, and XenDesktop HXD 3D Pro. Here’s a chart that shows their relative rendering performance and bandwidth efficiency:

But the question still remains:  Can you really do serious work from a regular desktop or notebook computer (or even a tablet) while your CAD software is running on a machine in a data center thousands of miles away?

Apparently you can.  For example, ABB has started to use XenDesktop HDX Pro3D to allow users in India to run Siemens PLM Solid Edge and Zuken’s E³.series software hosted on on servers in Switzerland.  According to Manuel Killer, Project Manager for CAx Technologies at  ABB Schweiz, “The desktop performance and integration of peripheral devices functioned smoothly. The CAD users in India have confirmed that they can work productively with the Citrix technology.”

Desktop and application virtualization offers some compelling benefits, not the least of which is that your valuable data stays in your data center, where it’s not likely to be stolen, and you can work anywhere you want (including the local Starbucks, if they don’t mind you hogging network bandwidth.) It’s not a new technology—companies have been using it for years to provide remote access to applications such as Microsoft Office or SAP. But, with improvements in GPU technology, it’s practical for use with demanding CAD applications.

Yet there’s more to this story. The very newest generation of GPUs, such as the NVIDIA VGX K2 , are designed for hardware virtualization. VGX provides direct access to the GPU frame buffer, maintaining high performance even with large 3D models. Citrix expects their NVIDIA VGX-accelerated XenDesktop platform to be able to serve up to 100 users with a single multi-GPU graphics card, using both OpenGL and DirectX.

While it’s not likely that serious CAD users would be interested in using shared GPUs, there are a lot of second-tier applications, such as viewing and collaboration, where this might be perfectly fine. The technology really opens up possibilities for giving secure access to 3D data to larger numbers of users.

Citrix is putting quite a bit of work into building reference architectures and certifications for their Design Engineer Virtual Workstation solutions. They’re working with an ecosystem of partners, including system vendors, graphics card hardware providers, professional graphics software, systems and graphics card hardware providers and systems integrators, to deliver reference designs and best practice guidelines. I expect CAD workstation virtualization is going to become a lot more common in the future.

Citrix   www.citrix.com

 

 

 

 

 

Should you buy an expensive graphics card?

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You already know the answer to this question. If you’re perfectly happy with the graphics performance of your CAD system, then the answer is “no.” If you’d like faster, smoother, or more realistic graphics on your system, then the answer is “yes.”

The term “expensive graphics card” might be troubling to GPU suppliers such as Nvidia and AMD. Yet, it is probably more accurate than, for example, “high-performance graphics card.” For many years, all graphics subsystems used in CAD capable computers (whether built-in, or on an add-in card) have been relatively high-performance. When comparing entry-level with top-of-the-line graphics, the most stark difference is price: free (something that comes with the computer), versus not-free (something you need to pay extra for.)

It’s only after you’ve come to the conclusion that it’s worth paying that extra that you need to start digging into the question: How much extra?

The practical differences between $100 graphics cards and $2000 graphics cards are not all that obvious to the uninitiated. There is no simple number-of-merit on a specification sheet that will tell you how good a graphics card is. To choose well, you need to start by doing a little homework.

A good starting point is AMD’s ebook, Simplifying the World of Professional Graphics. It’s well worth the read, even if you’re already reasonably knowledgeable about graphics hardware.

Designing Formula One sophistication with Bunkspeed SHOT Pro

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Cosmic Motors’ Daniel Simon is an internationally acclaimed concept designer and automotive futurist who’s worked with some of the world’s most prestigious automobile makers including Bugatti and Lamborghini. Simon is also the concept vehicle designer behind Disney’s 2010 blockbuster sci-fi flick, “Tron: Legacy,” and lead vehicle designer of Marvel’s highly anticipated 2011 summer release “Captain America.”

In early 2011, Simon added Formula One (F1) racecar designer to his resume, with the world debut of Hispania Racing’s (HRT) F111 car. As HRT enters its second season in the most competitive motorsport on Earth, they reached out to Simon to create strong and iconic livery for their 2011 car.

The first thing Simon tackled was to divide the car graphically into attractive red sponsors areas, and zones of freedom — the latter being distorted shapes where no sponsor sticker works. For the sponsor areas, there are many rules – F1 is one of the most expansive marketing fields in sports. Then, Simon filled the free zone with checkered flags and large racing numbers – “a playful, almost retro-romantic racing approach that I missed in this very serious sport,” claims Simon. The last touch was adding little humorous warning messages to resemble the look of modern aircraft. The reaction from the team and fans, when the F111 car was unveiled was overwhelming.

To turn the massive production CAD data of the F1 car into photo real images overnight for the season premiere, Simon relied on Bunkspeed SHOT Pro 3D rendering software running on NVIDIA Quadro 6000 professional graphics solutions.

“I had less than a day to render the complete press package for the global launch of the HRT F111 – which included 16 images at 5K resolution – there was no room for failure,” continues Simon. “With Bunkspeed SHOT Pro running on NVIDIA Quadro 6000 GPUs I was able to make the impossible happen, and complete the project in roughly 6.5 hours. It would have taken me twice as long if I used a traditional rendering solution running on CPUs.”

Bunkspeed

www.bunkspeed.com

NVIDIA

www. nvidia.com