NVTOP & Nsight

NVTOP

In HPC environments, GPU-intensive workloads often require real-time monitoring of GPU utilization. NVTOP (Neat Videocard TOP) is a Linux command-line tool, based on htop, that interactively reports GPU usage. On the cluster, the spider command can be used to check available versions. Loading nvtop also requires gcc/13.2.0 or gcc/13.2.0-nvptx:

module load gcc/13.2.0
module load nvtop
Info

NVTOP monitors GPU activity on compute nodes, so that it must be run on a node equipped with an active GPU. For information on allocating GPU nodes, refer to the cluster’s GPU usage documentation.

Sample output from NVTOP Sample output from NVTOP

Nsight

NVIDIA Nsight Systems is a system-wide performance analysis tool used to visualize and analyze application behavior. It helps identify optimization opportunities and supports scalability analysis across CPUs and GPUs, from large servers to small system-on-chip (SoC) platforms.

Nsight Systems provides:

  • Unbiased, system-level activity traces on a unified timeline
  • Low-overhead data collection suitable for production workloads
  • CPU parallelization and scheduling
  • GPU SM (streaming multiprocessor) utilization
  • CUDA workload and kernel activity
  • Communication, I/O, and OS interactions
  • Library-level traces

This tool enables users to examine relationships across hardware and software layers and diagnose performance bottlenecks in complex heterogeneous workloads.

Sample from Nsight Systems Sample from Nsight Systems This picture was taken from the NVIDIA Nsight Systems documentation.

To use the module on the cluster of the GWDG, please refer to this page.