Do you think of manufacturing as a game of chess? Rand Worldwide's technical product marketing Manager Krystian Link does. He sees the CFD and FEA experts, the designers, and the equipment in the shop as chess pieces, each with its own specialty, each abiding by its set of rules.

"A simulation engineer can do certain things well, comparable to a knight that moves in a certain direction. A rook moves differently. They're like program managers that can make big, impactful decisions, and have to be deployed differently. These pieces are always consistent, regardless of the product we make. Winning the game is launching the product right on time with quality, but how we get there changes every single time. I'll open the game differently, to see if I can do something better, more efficiently," he said.

At NVIDIA GTC 2026, while NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was introducing the NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX reference design system on stage, he highlighted the use of technologies from a number of partners, including Dassault Systèmes, Cadence, Siemens, and PTC. During the week of the conference, NVIDIA also announced partnerships with Cadence, Dassault Systèmes, Siemens, and Synopsys, among others. To get the details on these partnerships and what outcomes to expect, we speak to Tim Costa, GM and VP of industrial and computational engineering at NVIDIA.

The four simulation software titans all share “an enthusiasm for integrating accelerated computing” in their solutions, Costa said. Their integration “isn’t just about improving the total cost of ownership but about transforming what’s possible with real-time simulation.”

Costa also pointed out that agentic AI, made possible with accelerated computing, can “compress the product development lifecycle and improve time to market.” Perhaps the most important factor is the possibility to deliver real-time digital twins. “If your physics simulation takes three days, for example, that won’t be real time. You need to get to the point where you can solve your fluid, structural, acoustic, and thermal problems in real time,” he reasoned.

In immersive simulation exercises on NVIDIA Omniverse, the simulation software makers’ physics solvers, and NVIDIA’s AI-physics framework work in concert to enable real-time digital twins, Costa explained. “Companies that work in CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering) and EDA (Electronics Design Automation) can integrate our core CUDA-X libraries. That’s true of our libraries for first principle solver acceleration … hundreds of libraries like cuDSS [GPU-accelerated Direct Sparse Solver] and cuEST [for Electronic Structure Theory] .. We’re really just one click below [the simulation vendors’] solvers, working to accelerate their workloads and connect the real and the digital world,” he said.

At GTC San Jose, NVIDIA also unveiled the Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory platform, which includes DSX Sim to validate AI factories as High-Fidelity Digital Twins. ISV partners -- Cadence, Dassault Systèmes, Siemens, and Synopsy -- can integrate their own simulations and models for designers and builders of DSX AI factories.

“There’s tremendous hunger in the design and engineering space to adopt AI-- agentic AI, physical AI, and AI physics,” Costa said.

For his full comments, listen to the podcast.

A blizzard in the East Coast, TSA shortage, and flight cancellations disrupted DE 24/7 editors' conference coverage, but they still managed to collect news from Additive Manufacturing Strategies Show, ASSESS (hosted by NAFEMS), AMUG, and NVIDIA GTC.

Editorial Director Brian Albright discusses the networking opportunities at the Additive Manufacturing Strategies Show, his impressions of the keynotes and the atmosphere at ASSESS, a vendor-independent simulation user conference hosted by NAFEMS (The National Agency for Finite Element Methods and Standards), and the implications of the research data shared by McKinsey and Cambashi.

Associated Editor Stephanie Skernivitz discusses her visits to AMUG, an additive manufacturing show organized by the users themselves, and the travel issues' impact on show attendance.

Senior Editor Kenneth Wong talks about the news from NVIDIA GTC, where NVIDIA unveiled a new AI-targeted hardware system, touted its partnerships with simulation software vendors, and delivered a security feature for the open-source OpenClaw software.