Nsight Systems#
Nsight Systems is a system-wide performance analysis tool designed to visualize an application’s algorithms and identify the largest opportunities to optimize. It supports Pascal (SM 60) and newer GPUs.
A common use-case for Nsight Systems is to generate application timelines via the command line, which can later be visualised on a local computer using the GUI component. The GUI is not available on Bede.
On Bede, Nsight Systems is provided by a number of modules, with differing versions of nsys.
You should use a versions of nsys that is at least as new as the CUDA toolkit used to compile your application (if appropriate).
module load nsight-systems/2023.1.1
module load nsight-systems/2022.1.1
module load nsight-systems/2020.3.1
module load cuda/12.0.1 # provides nsys 2022.4.2
module load cuda/11.5.1 # provides nsys 2021.3.3
module load cuda/11.4.1 # provides nsys 2021.2.4
module load cuda/11.3.1 # provides nsys 2021.1.3
module load cuda/11.2.2 # provides nsys 2020.4.3
module load nvhpc/23.1 # provides nsys 2022.5.1
module load nvhpc/22.1 # provides nsys 2021.5.1
module load nvhpc/21.5 # provides nsys 2021.2.1
module load nsight-systems/2023.4.1
module load cuda/12.3.2 # provides nsys 2023.3.3
module load cuda/12.2.2 # provides nsys 2023.2.3
module load cuda/12.1.1 # provides nsys 2023.1.2
module load cuda/11.8.0 # provides nsys 2022.4.2
module load cuda/11.7.1 # provides nsys 2022.1.3
module load cuda/11.7.0 # provides nsys 2022.1.3
module load nvhpc/24.1 # provides nsys 2023.4.1
To generate an application timeline with Nsight Systems CLI (nsys):
nsys profile -o timeline ./myapplication <arguments>
Nsight systems can trace mulitple APIs, such as CUDA and OpenACC.
The --trace argument to specify which APIs should be traced.
See the nsys profiling command switch options for further information.
nsys profile -o timeline --trace cuda,nvtx,osrt,openacc ./myapplication <arguments>
Note
On Power9 systems such as Bede the --trace option osrt can lead to SIGILL errors with some versions of nsys. As this is part of the default set default, consider passing --trace cuda,nvtx instead.
Once this file has been downloaded to your local machine, it can be opened in nsys-ui/nsight-sys via File > Open > timeline.qdrep
More Information#
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Use the following Nsight report files to follow the tutorial.