Developing Digital Twin 3D Models on Dell PowerEdge R760xa with NVIDIA Omniverse virtualized platform

Related publications

This blog is part two of the blog series Dell Technologies PowerEdge R760xa with NVIDIA Omniverse:

Part One: Deploy Virtualized NVIDIA Omniverse Environment with Dell PowerEdge R760xa and NVIDIA L40 GPUs
Part Three: Synthetic Data Generation with Dell PowerEdge R760xa and NVIDIA Omniverse Platform

The following related technical white paper is also available:
A Digital Twin Journey: Computer Vision AI Model Enhancement with Dell Technologies Integrated Solutions & NVIDIA Omniverse

Introduction

Digital Twins are physically accurate virtual replicas of assets, processes, or environments. Digital Twins are becoming increasingly popular with organizations looking to benefit from timely, and better decision making. Having a digitized virtual twin of real-world resources might, for example, enable businesses to identify and prevent costly mistakes or anomalies before they occur.

The Digital Twin paradigm can be applied to a lot of real-world scenarios, both big and small!

Two images of planet Earth, one real and one digitized. Figure 1: Real-time weather twin

See Building Digital Twins of the Earth in Omniverse.

The Technical Challenge

Implementation of Digital Twin is a complex undertaking made all the more challenging by the fact there is no “one size fits all” approach.

Figure 2: Example attributes of a real-time synchronized 3D Digital Twin

See 5 Steps to Get Started with Digital Twins.

This article describes how Dell Technologies PowerEdge R760xa servers, in conjunction with the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, can be used in the development of physically accurate Digital Twin 3D workflows.

Omniverse

NVIDIA Omniverse is a platform of APIs, SDKs, and services that enable developers to easily integrate Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) and RTX rendering technologies into existing software tools and simulation workflows for building AI systems and 3D Digital Twin use cases.

The Omniverse ecosystem is designed from the ground up to enable development of new tools and workflows from scratch with customizable sample foundation application templates or SDKs that are easy to modify.

Laying the foundation for Digital Twin environments

An image of the various components of the virtualized Omniverse stack on Dell PowerEdge 760xa server Figure 3: Virtualized Omniverse stack on Dell PowerEdge 760xa server

Front view of the Dell PowerEdge 760xa server

Figure 4: Front and top view of the Dell PowerEdge 760xa server

For a sample configuration, refer to the Dell PowerEdge R760xa Technical Guide.

The PowerEdge R760xa server is positioned to meet the diverse needs of Digital Twin requirements such as 3D modelling, physics simulations, image rendering, computer vision, robotics, edge computing, AI training, and inferencing.

Taking the first steps into the Omniverse

Step One: Launcher is your gateway to the Omniverse

Launcher is an easy access GUI for enabling and learning about the Omniverse platform.

In Launcher, click the Exchange tab to download, install, and update Omniverse Apps and Connectors. Connectors extend the capabilities of Omniverse to integrate with a wide range of applications and services such as CAD, GIS, and VR.

This image shows a screenshot of the Launcher Exchange tab Figure 5: Launcher Exchange tab

Step Two:

USD Composer is a foundation app template built using NVIDIA Omniverse Kit. It takes advantage of the advanced 3D workflow capabilities of OpenUSD such as layers, variants, instancing, and animation caches. USD Composer lets you develop and compose physically accurate 3D scenes.

Note: See figure 7 depicting Assembly line scene generated with USD Composer.

Building 3D Scenes

For organizations looking to make more insightful and timely decisions by simulating their real-world resources—such as production lines, warehouse/factory designs, and computer vision AI anomaly detection capabilities—the generation of highly accurate 3D models that mirror real-world physics is crucial.

SimReady Assets

It’s not enough just to have 3D models that contain virtual assets that are visually accurate. For simulations to be insightful, 3D assets must also represent their real-world counterparts as closely as possible. NVIDIA is working to create a new 3D standard specification called SimReady assets. These assets are building blocks for virtual worlds.

Simulation platforms, such as Omniverse, can leverage SimReady assets (information and metadata) to make scenario modelling far more useful for research and training of a particular product or ecosystem.

See figures 6 and 7 below depicting the development of a basic automotive assembly line scene with both visual and SimReady assets.

This image shows a screenshot of an example Omniverse assets catalog Figure 6: Example Omniverse assets catalog

This image shows a grid of four screenshots of the 3D assembly line scenes rendered from various perspectives Figure 7: 3D assembly line scenes rendered from various perspectives

This image shows a screenshot of a rendered close-up of an assembly line scene Figure 8: Rendered close-up of an assembly line scene

The NVIDIA Omniverse RTX Renderer is a powerful rendering technology offering real-time and offline rendering capabilities.

RTX - Real-Time mode allows rendering more geometry than traditional rasterization methods while maintaining high fidelity. It is suitable for real-time applications.

In RTX - Interactive (Path Tracing) mode, the renderer uses a path tracing-based algorithm to achieve photorealistic results. This mode is ideal for scenarios where quality takes precedence over real-time performance with 4k or lower resolution. The balance of quality and performance depends on the given use case.

Performance and flexibility

The NVIDIA-SMI command-line utility (figure 9) shows an example of multi-GPU resource utilization (four physical L40 GPUs) on a Dell PowerEdge 760xa server and virtualized Omniverse instance.

Table 1: Example GPU assignment
Number of GPUs	Purpose
2	RTX rendering
1	3D scene simulation
1	Training computer vision model

This image shows a screenshot that lists the utilization of four L40 GPUs on a Dell PowerEdge 760xa server Figure 9: Utilization of four L40 GPUs on a Dell PowerEdge 760xa server

Conclusion

There is no single implementation approach for Digital Twins due to their diverse and complex nature. Requirements might evolve as development takes place, so flexibility is a key consideration when embarking on a Digital Twin venture.

Omniverse Enterprise is architected with interoperability in mind. Based on OpenUSD, the platform fundamentally transforms complex 3D workflows. You can easily connect your 3D product pipelines and unlock full design-fidelity visualization of your 3D datasets using purpose-built connector plugins for the most common 3D applications and data types.

The compatibility and collaboration capabilities of NVIDIA Omniverse and the flexibility and computational power of Dell Technologies PowerEdge Servers combine to enable a strong foundation for the development/use of Digital Twin workflows.