3 min read

NVIDIA made a series of new announcements, yesterday. These announcements include a new and open, 3D Design Collaboration Platform called Omniverse, NVIDIA T4 GPUs coming to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a new NVIDIA Isaac SDK, and the new Jetson computers.

NVIDIA Omniverse

NVIDIA Omniverse is an interactive open collaboration platform that can simplify the studio workflows for real-time graphics. NVIDIA Omniverse, announced yesterday,  has also added support for Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology (allows information exchange about modeling, shading, animation, etc across different applications) and Material Definition Language (allows artists to exchange information about surface materials).

Other features of Omniverse include watching projects unfold in real-time via Omniverse Viewer or a tool of their choice. The Omniverse Viewer offers very high-quality photorealistic images in real time by taking advantage of rasterization and offering support for NVIDIA RTX RT Cores, CUDA cores, and Tensor Core-enabled AI.   

NVIDIA Isaac SDK and the new Jetson Nano

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder, and CEO announced NVIDIA’s Isaac SDK, last week, at the GPU Technology Conference. NVIDIA’s Isaac SDK will be made publicly available as the Isaac SDK Robotics developer toolbox in April.  NVIDIA’s Isaac SDK toolbox offers developers access to Isaac applications, Gems (robot capabilities), a Robot Engine and Sim. Isaac SDK makes it easier for the developers to add AI for perception, navigation, and manipulation into next-gen models.

NVIDIA Isaac SDK has Isaac Robot Engine at the core that allows developers to build modular and high-speed robotics applications, including robot reference designs.

Additionally, the NVIDIA team has also decided to open source their robot hardware reference designs, including Carter autonomous delivery, Kaya, Jetson Nano, Isaac GEMs, Isaac robot engine, and Isaac Sim.  The Isaac SDK robot developer toolbox can be used to create apps using these hardware reference designs.

NVIDIA also announced a new AI computer for developers, called Jetson Nano, yesterday. It is available in two versions, the $99 developer kit (for makers, developers, students, etc) and the $129 production-ready module for mass market AI products. The Jetson Nano Developer Kit is available now and the Jetson Nano module will be made available in June 2019.

NVIDIA T4 GPUs

NVIDIA team published a blog post yesterday stating that AWS’s new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G4 instances will feature NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs, in the upcoming weeks.  

The new G4 instances will offer a versatile platform to its AWS customers to deploy a wide range of AI services. Customers will be able to pair the G4 instances with NVIDIA GPU acceleration software for accelerating deep learning, machine learning, and data analytics.T4 will also be supported by Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes.

The new EC2 G4 instances also offer support to the next generation of computer graphics to accelerate the workflows of creative and technical professionals. T4 will also be joining other Amazon EC2 instances featuring NVIDIA GPUs, providing developers and data scientists with compute resources available to support different customer needs.

Other than that, NVIDIA Research has also come out with a deep learning model called GauGAN that makes use of the generative adversarial networks, or GANs, to convert segmentation maps into lifelike images.

GauGAN allows its users to draw their own segmentation maps and manipulate the scene, labeling each segment with labels such as sand, sky, sea or snow. GauGAN has been trained on million images and is able to produce convincing results using its pair of networks, namely, a generator and a discriminator.

Also, the research paper behind GauGAN has been accepted as an oral presentation at the CVPR conference in June.

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Tech writer at the Packt Hub. Dreamer, book nerd, lover of scented candles, karaoke, and Gilmore Girls.