nTop announced an interesting partnership with NVIDIA.
nTop produces software to handle highly complex engineering designs specifically for additive manufacturing applications. They emerged several years ago when many competing products were unable to process the increasingly complex designs that leverage 3D print technology. nTop’s unique algorithms got around that problem, and they captured quite a bit of the market for this style of design.
Now they’ve announced a partnership with NVIDIA, the producer of high-end GPU hardware that’s used for computationally intense work including AI, video processing, mathematical simulations and more.
The goal of the partnership is to “enable engineering teams to deliver advanced products to market at unprecedented speeds”, which is highly desirable. The design process is often iterative, and faster speeds means more iterations can take place, making designs more refined.
nTop explains:
“Computational design is the process of creating algorithms that use engineering design logic to generate solutions to engineering problems. nTop’s software automates design and optimization processes while integrating with engineering teams’ existing design, analysis, and simulation tools and workflows. nTop’s integration with NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform allows engineering teams to accelerate product design and bring high-performance products to market faster and with less effort.”
It appears the two companies will embark on a series of projects to leverage NVIDIA GPU tech into nTop software. They’re starting with a project to integrate their software with NVIDIA’s Optic rendering framework, which should allow for far faster viewing of visualizations.
There’s more. nTop explains:
“Omniverse SDKs and APIs will also be used to integrate nTop implicits into the Omniverse and OpenUSD ecosystem to provide engineering teams an immersive 3D collaboration environment to see and interact with live digital twins of their parts and assemblies. As changes are made to designs in nTop, they can be reflected in OpenUSD applications developed on the Omniverse platform, with no meshing necessary for the transfer.”
Finally, it seems that NVIDIA is investing in nTop via that company’s NVentures venture capital fund. No details of the investment were provided, but it’s interesting to note that, according to Crunchbase, nTop has had only one previous investor, CSC Upshot, back in 2016. Evidently nTop has not sought investment, so the relationship with NVIDIA is unique.
This is quite an interesting partnership because it opens up a wide range of opportunities for nTop. NVIDIA’s equipment today powers the worlds of AI, crypto, rendering and much more. If nTop is able to leverage that computing power they should be able to substantially improve their product.
One interesting possibility is the use of advanced AI technology in nTop based on NVIDIA hardware. Many software companies are leveraging AI for a variety of purposes, and it is possible nTop may head that direction as well.
Via nTop and Crunchbase
