Virtual collaboration environment showing avatars next to a black BMW.

Architecture / Engineering / Construction

Realizing Dreams With RTX Virtual Workstations and Microsoft Azure

Objective

NVIDIA and Microsoft are helping TBI streamline construction processes and create the best collaborative workspaces possible.

Customer

TBI

Use Case

Virtualization

Products

Microsoft Azure NVads A10 v5 Series
NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation

Giving Teams the Right Tools at the Right Time

TBI is a consortium of 22 engineering, construction, and infrastructure companies whose mission is to improve society in sustainable ways. Their efforts benefit the economy and the environment by building smart offices, clean factories, intelligent tunnels, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and ship installations throughout the Netherlands.

Back in 2015, TBI’s CEO dreamt of being able to set up collaborative work environments in five minutes or less. This ambitious idea led to the development of the BIM Cloud Workspace, powered by NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstations and NVIDIA GPUs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The ever-evolving system enables rapid team collaboration and provides a retail store approach to application deployment for each user.

“Before we set up this workspace in the cloud, nobody could work together and there was no way of getting the right tools in place,” recalls Jeroen Pat, a Digitalization Consultant who works in the TBI’s C-suite as a liaison between TBI leadership and the IT team. “If your teams can’t work together at any given moment, you have a problem.”

TBI

Every Day is an Opportunity to Improve

For Frank Wolbertus, a VDC/BIM solution specialist at TBI, making things faster and more efficient through technology is what gets him out of bed in the morning. Responsible for all the hardware and software solutions within the company, Frank is one part of a three-man IT team that investigates new technologies and keeps an eye out for what’s possible.

“Back in 2015, we took some Microsoft development credits to create the BIM Cloud Workspace in a private cloud environment,” he recalls. “In partnership with Autodesk and Citrix, we made the impossible possible in about six months.”

“The elegant solution enabled us to deploy a controlled environment where everyone could work with each other,” adds Jeroen Pat. “As a firm with 250 projects going on at the same time across our affiliated companies, and with some projects having 50 or 60 partner organizations, this was incredibly important for us.”

In 2016, after the solution was up and running, TBI’s partners at Autodesk introduced them to people from NVIDIA. The TBI solution was already using NVIDIA T4 graphics cards, and the introduction led to continuous improvements to the system.

“We’re just a normal construction company making objects—buildings, bridges, tunnels—but to make them faster and better, we use a lot of technology,” Frank Wolbertus says. “Working with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and others has allowed us to make dramatic increases in performance.”

Summary

With NVIDIA CloudXR, BMW Group experienced key benefits including:

Dreamt of creating collaborative workspaces in the cloud in 2015.
Developed the BIM Cloud Workspace to facilitate team collaboration.

Began working directly with NVIDIA in 2016 to improve power and performance.
Added cloud-based, GPU-partitioning in 2022 for more affordable resource allocation.

Currently exploring multi-cloud possibilities with Windows 10 multi-user deployments
Regularly looks for inspiration from industries outside construction.

TBI

Putting Users First

Today, TBI runs Azure NVads A10 v5-powered cloud clusters—built with NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs—for GPU virtualization that offers accelerated computing and seamless user experiences across multiple workloads. According to Frank Wolbertus, the solution is the result of the company’s mission to give users the best workspaces. “That’s really our simple goal,” he says.

Backed by NVIDIA Virtual GPU technology, RTX Virtual Workstation and Azure NVads A10 v5 Virtual Machines support the broadest ecosystem of rendering engines and other graphics-intensive applications, giving the architects, designers, and analytics people at TBI greater flexibility with big files and complex datasets.

“We need this kind of capacity to run things like AI simulations,” Jeroen Pat says. “For example, we’re using a game engine to test how different situations involving traffic, fire, and weather impact the tunnels we build.” With the game engine in place, tunnels can be stress-tested before they’re moved to their intended locations, reducing on-site inspection time from six months to two weeks.

NVIDIA GPUs are also supercharging TBI’s ability to renovate historic buildings and build modern nuclear power plants. Both activities require extensive and precise location scanning via drones and other sensors. “We use point clouds to distribute these enormous scans, so our people can engineer the possibilities right into the 3D environment,” Jeroen Pat says.

TBI

GPU-Partitioning in the Cloud

Another key feature of TBI’s VDI solution is the ability to right-size access to graphics and compute resources to individual users. According to Frank Wolbertus, the new capability allows TBI to “give people exactly what they need, instead of giving them a lot of GPU power that they never use.”

Previously, deploying virtual workstations in the cloud was expensive because it was impossible to divide GPU resources among users. But now, by using GPU-partitioning (GPU-P), virtual machines can be provisioned based on individual user workloads.

NVIDIA A10 GPUs with 24GB of memory can be flexibly partitioned starting at a 4Q profile size (one-sixth of a GPU) all the way up to two full GPUs delivered through NVads A10 v5 Virtual Machines. Each partition includes a full RTX Virtual Workstation license, and customers can either deploy a single virtual workstation per user or offer multiple sessions using the Windows Enterprise multi-session operating system.

“Every year we hold the old environment up to the light to see if we can find new technologies that can make the system better, faster, and provide a better user experience…We often get valuable information and contacts from NVIDIA that lead us to technologies that weren’t even invented for the construction industry.”

Frank Wolbertus
Solution Specialist VDC/BIM

Technology Investments Continue to Pay Off

Never one to rest on his laurels, Frank Wolbertus says that any savings achieved through advanced technology are used to make additional improvements.

Jeroen Pat and Frank Wolbertus both have a bold vision for the future that includes a range of short- and long-term goals, and the company is already hiring more technologists, data scientists, game developers, and AI specialists to help improve sustainability, streamline logistics, and increase analytics capabilities. TBI’s existing cloud investments, powered by NVIDIA GPUs and software, future-proof the virtual workspace and enable TBI’s teams to keep pushing boundaries.

“We have several things on our wish list, including the ability to place markers throughout 3D environments and use object recognition and augmented reality technologies to access live data for maintaining equipment,” Jeroen Pat says. “We’re also working on bringing more information to the construction sites themselves to eliminate paper.”

Frank Wolbertus says that he and his team are “always keeping an eye on what the world is doing and how we can incorporate new technologies. We also freely give people advice on how we do things and show them what the possibilities are, because one day we’re competing and the next day we’re on the same project.”

“If your teams can’t work together at any given moment, you have a problem.”

Jeroen Pat
Digitization Consultant

Why NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs?

Speed and reliability to support advanced building information management (BIM) applications.
Ability to simulate real-life disaster situations using the NVIDIA RTX technology.
Ability to bring more real-time data to construction sites and maintenance crews.

Learn more about NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstations and other solutions on Azure.

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