Jensen Huang, head of chip manufacturer Nvidia, shows a prototype of the new chip called ‘Drive … [+]
The Fall 2022 edition of Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (aka GTC) is coming up next week and it’s another great opportunity for anyone interested in learning about how AI and the metaverse can be utilized. It’s also a chance to see Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang show off the latest chip and software advancements of the 3D graphics and AI pioneer. GTC Fall 2022 is again a free, all virtual event that runs from September 19-22, 2022, Huang’s keynote kicking off day 2 on September 20, 2022 at 8:00 PDT.
While Nvidia is still the top player in graphics cards for PC gaming, it’s long past the time when video games were the primary target market for its chips. Nvidia platforms are used for everything from medical research to financial services to industrial control to cloud and of course automotive.
Nvidia engineers also do way more than just design silicon. Engineers represent 80% of the company’s 25,000 staff and more than half of those are working on software. That goes way beyond just coding device drivers. In the automotive sector, Nvidia has developed a full automated driving system that is part of its DRIVE
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But whether it’s automated driving or medical research, one of the key connecting elements is artificial intelligence. The horsepower provided by Nvidia chips in data centers, robots and cars has been a key enabler in many of the AI advances of the past decade. Data centers full of Nvidia powered servers are churning through millions of images to train machine learning models.
This upcoming GTC will feature over 200 sessions led by Nvidia engineers, researchers and users of the company’s platforms from nearly every industry. Anyone interested in learning more about how to develop projects using Nvidia technology should register for GTC. It’s free of charge again and the sessions will remain online after the event.
For those that are focused on automotive, it’s still worth perusing the entire session catalog because there are likely to be sessions that are tangential but still highly relevant. For example, Nvidia’s automated driving simulation platform, DRIVE Sim, is based on Omniverse which in turn leverages technologies like ray tracing to create photorealistic and physically accurate environments for testing automated vehicles. Those environments can be infinitely varied to test different lighting, weather, road conditions as well as placing different combinations of other road users in the environment.
The same Omniverse platform is also used for creating digital twins of factories, warehouses and complete cities. Understanding how Omniverse is being used in other applications can potentially help developers to better understand how to use it in their own domain.
Another potential crossover involves medicine and automated driving. Research that’s being done on modeling the human body and its responses to inputs can be valuable to automated driving developers. When people ride around in a vehicle without any direct control of its operation, they may be more susceptible to motion sickness. Understanding that physiological response and potentially including those models into AV simulations could lead to improved control strategies that reduce the risk of motion sickness and lead to a more comfortable ride.
Of course the highlight of any GTC is Jensen Huang’s keynote. This is an opportunity to hear about the latest new announcements from Nvidia and he’s always an entertaining presenter. The keynote will stream starting at 8 am PDT on Tuesday September 20, 2022. Register for Fall GTC 2022 here.
