In Operation
As you may be aware, nvidia-smi prints its results only once. nvitop can do the same with the command $ nvitop -1. But by default the software starts in its monitoring mode.
Issuing the command $ nvitop lets us monitor GPU usage with bar charts in addition to a process list.
We can sort the process list by GPU-INDEX, PID, USER, GPU-MEM, %SM, %CPU, %MEM and by TIME, both in ascending and descending order. We can also filter the processes so that only GPU processes with the compute context or graphics context are displayed.
For each process we can interrogate the process environment, kill or terminate the selected process, as well as toggle a tree-view screen showing the GPU processes and their parent processes.
We can change the display mode to display history graphs by pressing the f key.
Our test machine hosts a single GPU, but the tool will display multiple GPUs if present on a system.
There’s a handy help screen (accessed by pressing the h key in the program) which shows the keyboard shortcuts.
Summary
nvitop is our recommended tool for monitoring NVIDIA GPUs. It can run as a single instance (nvitop -1) like nvidia-smi, or in its default monitoring mode.
Unlike some other tools, nvitop doesn’t access the output of nvidia-smi. Instead, it queries the device stats using NVML Python bindings directly. This offers efficiency gains over other similar tools.
There’s support for keyboard and mouse.
nvitop provides APIs to query the device and process status. This enables developers to integrate the tool into their applications.
This is cross-platform software running under Linux and Windows.
Website: github.com/XuehaiPan/nvitop
Support: Documentation
Developer: Xuehai Pan
License: Dual license: Apache License Version 2.0 and GNU General Public License v3.0
nvitop is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation / Summary
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