Accelerating cutting-edge simulations
Digital twins. The metaverse. Mimicking the real world entails simulating cutting-edge environments with myriad sensors and multiple avatars and agents.
Unity Simulation Pro – a simulation-optimized runtime build – enables you to run these simulations at scale, on premises or in your private cloud, making it simpler, faster, and more cost-effective to test and train powerful simulations.
How it works
Unity Simulation Pro removes dependencies on systems that do not benefit from simulation, providing an efficient, optimized solution that maximizes your infrastructure investment. It has two key features: headless rendering (running the Unity Player headless) and multi-GPU distributed rendering.
Headless rendering build
Headless rendering is a simulation-specific version of the Unity Linux runtime optimized for running in a pure headless fashion, without any dependency on the X server and window manager.
This provides simulation-specific performance advantages that can contribute up to 50% in simulation efficiency based on internal benchmarks.
Multi-GPU distributed rendering
Distributed rendering decouples execution of user scripts and CPU tasks from the rendering pipeline, allowing multiple accelerators – and multiple hosts – to share the rendering workload.
This feature is useful when simulating:
- Multiple cameras (sensors)
- Complex scenes with long render times
- High-throughput co-simulation that involves hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) or software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation
Training embodied AI agents
The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) used reinforcement learning and Unity Simulation Pro to train a robot to maneuver around a room. Unity Simulation Pro sped up the process from 200 fps using one GPU to over 5,000 fps using 32 GPUs. The time it takes to train their robot was reduced from more than two weeks to less than two hours.
"AI2-THOR is a pioneering simulation platform with the most diverse repository of indoor scenes, and while it provides highly realistic simulation, this high fidelity is computationally intensive. The headless version of AI2-THOR, which is built on Unity Simulation Pro, enables us to train our models in large clusters. The experiments that used to take weeks to finish, can now finish in just a few days."
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Pricing is based on your infrastructure. Contact us to get a quote.
Unity Simulation Pro is a simulation-optimized version of the Unity Pro runtime. It does require separate licensing.
Multi-GPU distributed rendering runs on any operating system. Headless rendering is Linux-only.
Unity 2020.3 and above.
Unity 2020 LTS (2020.3).
Both headless rendering and multi-GPU distributed rendering are available as separate features within Unity Simulation Pro. Depending on the needs of your project, you can use one or both.
Please contact us for more information.