Everyone's favorite AI chip co. has been pitching digital twins for years. At NVIDIA GTC 2024, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in a keynote that “we believe that everything manufactured will have digital twins.”
From the journal Nature, March 11:
A project that intertwines data on weather, water flow and energy demand to create a 3D model of the whole river basin would enable researchers and others to make water-management decisions in real time.
China’s Yangtze River is the longest in Eurasia and the third-longest on the planet, flowing more than 6,000 kilometres from the Tibetan Plateau to the East China Sea. Its basin covers almost one-fifth of China’s land area and is home to hundreds of millions of people. More than 52,000 reservoirs have been built on the Yangtze and its tributaries since the 1950s to mitigate flooding, generate hydropower, stabilize water supplies and protect ecology.
There are a host of challenges in managing this massive basin to support the sometimes-contradictory goals of developing water sources sustainably and protecting ecosystems. Population growth, development and urbanization in the region are constantly increasing the demand for water, while escalating water pollution and pressures on biodiversity. Although the Yangtze River basin’s average annual precipitation has changed relatively little in the past two decades, shifts in rainfall patterns and landscape use have led to a rise in the frequency and severity of droughts and floods.
For example, the hydropower company China Yangtze Power, based in Beijing, has found that the average drought period is now two weeks longer than it was in 2000. In 2020, unusually heavy rains led to the Three Gorges Dam in Yichang having the highest inflow rates since its construction in 2003. Management of the water flow in that reservoir helped to mitigate flooding, but this inundation still affected 45 million people, with more than 140 people dead or missing and caused an estimated US$16.5 million in damages1.
A smarter, more robust system of tracking, modelling and managing water in this basin will help to alleviate such issues, resulting in enhanced operational safety and reduced costs. To this end, the Changjiang Water Resources Commission (CJW) is spearheading the Smart Yangtze River Project (see go.nature.com/4h51xzf), under the auspices of the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources. This project was proposed in 2022 and now has 597 million yuan (US$82 million) of dedicated government investment, for a basin-wide, full-coverage water-monitoring system, with a planned completion date of 2035 for the preliminary design. Many hydropower companies are also contributing hundreds of millions of yuan to the initiative.
At the heart of the project is a digital twin of the Yangtze River basin. This twin consists of an advanced 3D simulation of the whole region, using data on weather, water flow, ecology, sediment properties, topography, energy demand and more, to provide real-time modelling of projected flood routing, water engineering, scheduling, shipping, ecological impacts and other outcomes.
The intuitive interface provides a reliable assessment of the impact of resource-management decisions and watershed-protection actions on sustainable development and biodiversity health. It can be used for forecasting, early warning, emergency-system rehearsals and contingency planning. A first version of this digital twin already exists and is in use (see ‘Yangtze river basin’, and go.nature.com/3wvchj1), encompassing two supplementary watersheds (of the Han and Lishui rivers) and four dams (the Three Gorges, Danjiangkou, Jiangya and Zaoshi). This will be substantially improved and expanded with more data and modelling over the coming years.....
....MUCH MORE
Previously on digital twins:
February 26, 2024 - "Singapore-based startup Mesh Bio raises $3.5 M to make digital twin technologies available at scale"
April 6, 2024 - "A Digital Twin Might Just Save Your Life"
This is something that Nvidia has been pushing and which Mr. Huang mentioned at last month's geekfest. More after the jump....
....From VentureBeat, April 3: "The impressive progress of Omniverse and digital twins | Nvidia GTC 24 panel"
And at Nvidia: "Build Digital Twins with OpenUSD | NVIDIA"
And from NVDA at GTC 2024:
NVIDIA Announces Earth Climate Digital Twin
March 18, 2024 17:11 ETNVIDIA Announces Omniverse Cloud APIs to Power Wave of Industrial Digital Twin Software Tools
March 18, 2024 17:38 ET
Here's last year's keynote:
As we've said, if you want to own the future, own this company.
Over the last ten years we've also said some other stuff about NVDA.
Today the stock closed at $108.76 up $1.78 (+1.66%) after dropping as low as $104.77. On March 7 we posted "As NVIDIA’s Quantum Day Nears, Analysts Suggest Event is More Than a Gesture" (NVDA):
You know what looks cheap? Nvidia looks cheap.
That's not to say it can't get cheaper but to quote some of the old-time traders: "Well bought is half sold."
$111.29 last, up $0.72 (+0.65%) in late pre-market trading.
