Nvidia Corp. today announced the second generation of Nvidia OVX, its purpose-built data-center-scale computing system built on next-generation graphics processors and designed to power digital twin simulations for industrial metaverse applications.

OVX was launched in March, as a computing system designed to power large-scale 3D virtual worlds and digital twins, which are high-fidelity virtual spaces and objects that simulate their real-world copies as closely as possible.

By simulating the real world in 3D virtual worlds at scale, called the industrial metaverse, enterprise companies can iterate on products, experiment and optimize the digital twins to see how they react before making final changes in the real world.

OVX is optimized to work with Nvidia’s Omniverse real-time photorealistic physics simulation and collaboration platform that allows engineers, designers and artists to work together to design virtual worlds and spaces that act exactly like the real world. As a result, it makes it possible to simulate large-scale digital twins such as factory floor plans, warehouses, cities or even railway networks.

“Large-scale digital twins are redefining how nearly every industry plans, designs and builds in the physical world,” said Bob Pette, vice president of professional visualization at Nvidia. “Nvidia OVX will provide the next generation of compute power required for the most complex digital twins of factories, buildings and entire cities.”

The new OVX systems are themselves built with the Nvidia L40 graphical processing unit, based on the next-generation Ada Lovelace architecture, named after the English mathematician who is often regarded as the first programmer.

The GPU sports third-generation RT Cores and fourth-generation Tensor Cores to provide accelerated ray-traced and path-traced rendering capabilities and physically accurate simulations of digital objects. Every server node supports eight Nvidia L40 GPUs.

In addition to the powerful GPU, the OVX includes the Nvidia ConnectX-7 SmartNIC network card capable of providing 200G networking on each port and fast in-line data encryption. Each server node holds three ConnectX-7 adapters.

BMW Group and Land Rover have been slated to become the first to be equipped with the new OVX systems to simulate factories using digital twins.

“Planning our factories of the future starts with building state-of-the-art digital twins using Nvidia Omniverse,” said Jürgen Wittmann, head of innovation and virtual production at BMW Group. “Using Nvidia OVX systems to run our digital twin workloads will provide the performance and scale needed to develop large-scale photorealistic models of our factories and conduct true-to-reality simulations that will transform our manufacturing, design and production processes.”

The new second-generation Nvidia OVX systems will be available from Inspur, Lenovo and Supermicro by early 2023. Gigabyte, H3C and QCT will be offering them in the future.

Image: Nvidia