Sizing Up Voyager's 5G Network 10X Faster - NVIDIA Finds Dramatic Time, Cost Savings With Altair's 5G Wireless Network Solution

About the Customer

Since its founding in 1993, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been a pioneer in accelerated computing. The company’s invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined computer graphics, and ignited the era of modern artificial intelligence (AI). NVIDIA is now a full-stack computing company with data-center-scale offerings that are reshaping the industry.

Their Challenge

NVIDIA built a massive 750,000 sq. ft. building named Voyager – a reference to both Star Trek’s Voyager and the “v” in NVIDIA. Indeed, entering Voyager, one goes where no one has gone before. The base camp reception area sits at the foot of a mountain and features numerous tiers interspersed with people, offices, and garden spaces. To accompany the architectural innovation, NVIDIA wanted an equally impressive, private 5G network to support multi-access edge computing (MEC) applications and leverage the unlicensed Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band. The first MEC application required intelligent video analytics with 5G cameras in the lobby area.

A network development challenge was the 150 MHz limit within the CBRS spectrum. To handle this, NVIDIA decided to use 100 MHz minimum bandwidth to maintain the desired throughput levels and use the same frequency carrier for all radio units. This made the 5G network’s needed throughput challenging. NVIDIA also wanted to compare two different vendor radio units, one with directional transmission and one with omni-directional transmission, each with 4 downlink (DL) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) layers and 2 uplink (UL) MIMO layers.