Preparing for the Metaverse with NVIDIA Omniverse and Dell Technologies
Mon, 21 Mar 2022 11:47:03 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
As technology evolves, it can sometimes seem like creativity leads to complexity. In the case of 3D graphics creation, teams with a broad range of skills must come together. Each of the team members — from artists, designers, and animators to engineers and project managers — typically have a special skill set requiring their own tools, systems, and work environment.
But the technical issues do not stop there. As existing technologies mature and new ones enter the scene, the number of specialized 3D design and content creation tools rapidly increases. Many of them lack compatibility or interoperability with other tools. And across the 3D graphics ecosystem, hybrid workforces require a “physical workstation” experience wherever they may be.
It is no small task to provide compute-power access to a geographically distributed team in a way that enables collaboration without compromising security. But to remain competitive and retain top talent, companies must provide the necessary tools to the remote workforce.
Solutions for remote, collaborative, and secure 3D graphics creation
The new Dell Validated Design for VDI with NVIDIA Omniverse makes it possible for 3D graphics creation teams to work together from anywhere in real-time using multiple applications within shared virtual 3D worlds. NVIDIA® Omniverse users can access the resources and compute power they need through a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI), without the need for a local physical workstation.
By running NVIDIA Omniverse on Dell PowerEdge NVIDIA‑Certified Systems™, companies can enable 3D graphics teams to connect with major design tools, assets, and projects to collaborate and iterate seamlessly from early-stage ideation through to finished creation.
Designs for NVIDIA Omniverse rely on Dell PowerEdge NVIDIA‑Certified Systems and leverage a VxRail‑based virtual workstation environment with NVIDIA A40 GPUs. VMware® Horizon® can provide workload virtualization. The designs were validated with Autodesk® Maya® 3D animation and visual effects software.
The flexible solution supports the varying needs of different industries. Within media and entertainment, for example, the goal might be to create virtual worlds for films or games. Those in architecture, engineering, and construction might want to see their innovative building designs come to life within a 3D reality. Manufacturers might look to collaborate on interactive and physically accurate visualizations of potential future products or create realistic simulations of factory floors.
For all organizations, the benefits are significant:
- Empower the workforce–Enhance 3D interactive user collaboration and productivity for remote and distributed teams.
- Boost efficiency–Streamline deployment, management and support with engineering‑validated designs created in close collaboration with NVIDIA.
- Collaborate securely–Protect data against cyberthreats from the data center to the endpoint with built‑in security features.
Transforming 3D graphics production
At Dell Technologies, we are excited about NVIDIA Omniverse and its ability to enable collaboration for designers, engineers, and other innovators leveraging Dell PowerEdge servers. Dell Validated Design for VDI with NVIDIA Omniverse solutions have the potential to transform every stage of 3D production, a crucial step forward toward the metaverse. According to the Marvel® database, “The Omniverse is every version of reality and existence imaginable and unimaginable” and brings together our physical and digital lives with augmented reality, extended reality and virtual reality in our physical world like the Oasis in Ready Player One.
An open platform built for virtual collaboration and real‑time simulation, NVIDIA Omniverse streamlines and accelerates even the most complex 3D workflows by enabling remote workers to collaborate using multiple apps simultaneously. Dell Technologies is committed to offering innovative solutions to help customers manage their collaborative and performance-intensive workflows.
Learn more about Dell Validated Design for VDI with NVIDIA Omniverse.
Related Blog Posts
Preparing for the Metaverse with NVIDIA Omniverse and Dell Technologies
Thu, 14 Apr 2022 20:01:45 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Initially published on March 21, 2022 at: https://infohub.delltechnologies.com/p/preparing-for-the-metaverse-with-nvidia-omniverse-and-dell-technologies/
As technology evolves, it can sometimes seem like creativity leads to complexity. In the case of 3D graphics creation, teams with a broad range of skills must come together. Each of the team members — from artists, designers, and animators to engineers and project managers — typically have a special skill set requiring their own tools, systems, and work environment.
But the technical issues do not stop there. As existing technologies mature and new ones enter the scene, the number of specialized 3D design and content creation tools rapidly increases. Many of them lack compatibility or interoperability with other tools. And across the 3D graphics ecosystem, hybrid workforces require a “physical workstation” experience wherever they may be.
It is no small task to provide compute-power access to a geographically distributed team in a way that enables collaboration without compromising security. But to remain competitive and retain top talent, companies must provide the necessary tools to the remote workforce.
Solutions for remote, collaborative, and secure 3D graphics creation
The new Dell Validated Design for VDI with NVIDIA Omniverse makes it possible for 3D graphics creation teams to work together from anywhere in real-time using multiple applications within shared virtual 3D worlds. NVIDIA® Omniverse users can access the resources and compute power they need through a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI), without the need for a local physical workstation.
By running NVIDIA Omniverse on Dell PowerEdge NVIDIA‑Certified Systems™, companies can enable 3D graphics teams to connect with major design tools, assets, and projects to collaborate and iterate seamlessly from early-stage ideation through to finished creation.
Designs for NVIDIA Omniverse rely on Dell PowerEdge NVIDIA‑Certified Systems and leverage a VxRail‑based virtual workstation environment with NVIDIA A40 GPUs. VMware® Horizon® can provide workload virtualization. The designs were validated with Autodesk® Maya® 3D animation and visual effects software.
The flexible solution supports the varying needs of different industries. Within media and entertainment, for example, the goal might be to create virtual worlds for films or games. Those in architecture, engineering, and construction might want to see their innovative building designs come to life within a 3D reality. Manufacturers might look to collaborate on interactive and physically accurate visualizations of potential future products or create realistic simulations of factory floors.
For all organizations, the benefits are significant:
- Empower the workforce–Enhance 3D interactive user collaboration and productivity for remote and distributed teams.
- Boost efficiency–Streamline deployment, management and support with engineering‑validated designs created in close collaboration with NVIDIA.
- Collaborate securely–Protect data against cyberthreats from the data center to the endpoint with built‑in security features.
Transforming 3D graphics production
At Dell Technologies, we are excited about NVIDIA Omniverse and its ability to enable collaboration for designers, engineers, and other innovators leveraging Dell PowerEdge servers. Dell Validated Design for VDI with NVIDIA Omniverse solutions have the potential to transform every stage of 3D production, a crucial step forward toward the metaverse. According to the Marvel® database, “The Omniverse is every version of reality and existence imaginable and unimaginable” and brings together our physical and digital lives with augmented reality, extended reality and virtual reality in our physical world like the Oasis in Ready Player One.
An open platform built for virtual collaboration and real‑time simulation, NVIDIA Omniverse streamlines and accelerates even the most complex 3D workflows by enabling remote workers to collaborate using multiple apps simultaneously. Dell Technologies is committed to offering innovative solutions to help customers manage their collaborative and performance-intensive workflows.
Learn more about Dell Validated Design for VDI with NVIDIA Omniverse.
Deploy Virtualized NVIDIA Omniverse Environment with Dell PowerEdge R760xa and NVIDIA L40 GPUs
Thu, 16 Nov 2023 17:51:32 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Introduction
Digital Twins (DT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are driving a massive increase in the volume of data organizations need to manage. Harnessing the insight potential from within this data is a constant challenge that drives the need for evermore performant and flexible solutions.
This article describes how hardware from Dell Technologies running NVIDIA Omniverse software can be deployed using GPU virtualization to provide more flexibility and performance for DT and AI applications.
The Technical Challenge
A key challenge for IT administrators is providing optimized infrastructure hardware and software that can support the integration of complex new technologies such as AI and DT.
NVIDIA Omniverse offers an integrated ecosystem of solutions harnessing hardware acceleration plus software designed for DT workloads and 3D modeling collaboration.
Omniverse
The NVIDIA Omniverse platform offers developers a vast increase in creativity and efficiency potential. It is a scalable, multi-GPU, real-time reference development suite for 3D modeling and design collaboration based on the Pixar Universal Scene Description (USD) framework and NVIDIA RTX technology.
Designers, artists, and creators can use the power of Omniverse to accelerate their DT and high-fidelity 3D workflows. It provides real-time ray tracing and AI-enhanced graphics, quintessential for simulating the real world within a DT environment.
Dell PowerEdge R760xa Server
The PowerEdge R760xa server shines for both DT and AI applications. Coupled with either 4x NVIDIA L40 or L40S PCIe, 48 GB GPUs and enabled by Intel Xeon Scalable processors, this server provides the processing muscle for reliable, precise, and fast 3D Graphics and Compute centric workloads.
The PowerEdge R760xa server is positioned perfectly to meet the diverse needs of DT requirements such as 3D modeling, physics simulations, image rendering, computer vision, robotics, edge computing, AI training and Inferencing.
Laying the Foundation for A Digital Twin Environment:
Omniverse installations come in two deployment flavors: Omniverse Workstation or Enterprise. This article concentrates on the deployment of Omniverse Enterprise on Dell PowerEdge R760xa servers.
Deploying Omniverse Enterprise as a virtualized instance enables a flexible infrastructure configuration that is tailored to individual requirements, such as splitting physical GPUs resources into vGPU partitions. This flexibility can prove immensely beneficial when DT or AI workload needs are likely to change during development.
NVIDIA’s Omniverse Install Guide references three key components, all of which can be served within the confines of a virtualized environment.
Component | Description |
---|---|
Licensing | Mechanism to procure and enable Omniverse software. |
Enterprise Nucleus | The central database and collaborative engine of Omniverse. Enables users to share and modify representations of virtual worlds. |
Launcher | The native client for downloading, installing, and updating Omniverse Apps, Extensions, and Connectors. |
Some prerequisites before you start:
- NVIDIA Enterprise or Developer Account.
- Suitable Graphics Capable GPU, such as NVIDIA Lovelace GPU series
- NVIDIA GPU driver (≥471.11)
- Suitable OS—Linux or Windows
- Note that each Launcher Application may have its own unique system requirements.
Setting Up a Virtualized Omniverse
NVIDIA’s Virtualized Deployment Guide outlines several foundational steps needed to create a virtualized Omniverse solution.
- VMware vSphere ESXi Hypervisor
- VMware vCenter
- NVIDIA vGPU Manager (VIB)
- NVIDIA License System (NLS)
Virtualized Omniverse environments that are built on top of high-performant infrastructure like the Dell PowerEdge R760xa server create a foundation for building 3D, DT, and AI solutions.
Platform | Dell PowerEdge 760xa | |
CPU | 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6438M | |
GPU | 4x NVIDIA L40 | |
FP32(Tera Flops) | 90 | |
Memory (GB) | 48 GDDR6 w/EEC | |
Media Engines | 3 Video Encoder 3 Video Decoder 4 JPEG Decoder | |
Power (Watts) | 300 | |
Memory | 512 GB DDR5 | |
Software Stack | VMware ESXi, 8.0.1 Windows 10 Enterprise 10.0.19045 NVIDIA vGPU Grid Driver 16.1 Omniverse USD Composer 2023.2.0 Omniverse Launcher 1.8.11 Omniverse Nucleus 2023.1.0 |
Post-Deployment Configuration Example.
The following figure shows a VMware vCenter Omniverse USD Composer Virtual Workstation configured with 4 x L40 vGPUs.
A sample 3D scene being rendered within the Omniverse USD Composer application is shown in the following figure.
The NVIDIA-SMI command-line utility shows 4 physical L40 GPUs configured in vGPU mode with Virtual Workstation vWS profile (Enabling both graphic and compute acceleration). Natively the USD Composer App consumes all available GPU resources to render the depicted 3D scene.
A more realistic virtualized Omniverse configuration might be, 1 to 2 GPUs assigned to rendering tasks with other GPUs being assigned to other 3D or DT tasks, such as PhysX simulations or AI model training.
Conclusion
Complex DT workloads encapsulate the integration of 3D models, simulations, and AI software components, each with their own unique system requirements. NVIDIA Omniverse is not a one-size-fits-all solution but rather a dynamic 3D ecosystem for collaboratively creating shared virtual worlds.
Often in development scenarios, system requirements may not be fully understood and thus the need for a flexible infrastructure solution. Omniverse can be easily configured and customized for various applications and customer needs as development evolves.
We found that virtualized Omniverse deployment allows for amazing flexibility to meet numerous workload requirements!
References
Virtual Workstation Interactive Collaboration with NVIDIA Omniverse