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NVIDIA Nsight Tools on RCAC Clusters

Tools installed along with CUDA on RCAC clusters

NVIDIA Nsight tools are installed along with CUDA on the clusters. Below is a list of the tools that can be found on the clusters. Some of these tools have both command-line interface (CLI) and graphical user interface (GUI) versions; for example, nsys has a corresponding GUI version called nsys-ui.

Tool in bin/ Corresponding NVIDIA Profiling Tool Purpose
nsys Nsight Systems (CLI) System-wide performance profiling for CPUs & GPUs
nsys-ui Nsight Systems (GUI) Graphical user interface for Nsight Systems
ncu Nsight Compute (CLI) Kernel-level CUDA performance profiling
ncu-ui Nsight Compute (GUI) Graphical user interface for Nsight Compute
nvprof Deprecated CUDA Profiler Legacy CUDA profiling tool (replaced by Nsight Compute & Nsight Systems)
nvvp Nsight Visual Profiler (deprecated) GUI tool for visualizing nvprof results
compute-sanitizer Compute Sanitizer Memory and correctness checks for CUDA applications
cuda-gdb CUDA-GDB Debugging CUDA applications using GDB
cuda-gdbserver CUDA-GDB Server Remote CUDA debugging
nsight-sys Not recommended, use nsys or nsys-ui (Alias for nsys, use CLI or GUI version instead)

Versions Available on RCAC Clusters

Cluster CUDA Nsight Systems (nsys) Nsight Compute (ncu) Compute Sanitizer (compute-sanitizer) nvprof (nvprof) CUDA GDB (cuda-gdb)
Gautschi 12.6.0 2024.4.2 2024.3.0 2024.3.0 12.6.37 12.6 (Based on GDB 13.2)
Anvil 12.0.1 2022.4.2 2022.4.1 2022.4.1 12.0.147 12.0 (Based on GDB 12.1)
Anvil 11.4.2 2021.3.2 2021.2.2 2021.2.1 11.4.120 11.4 (Based on GDB 10.1)
Anvil 11.2.2 2020.4.3 2020.3.1 2020.3.1 11.2.152 11.2 (Based on GDB 8.3.1)
Anvil 11.0.3 2020.3.2 2020.1.2 2020.1.2 11.0.221 11.0 (Based on GDB 8.2)
Gilbreth 12.6.0 2024.4.2 2024.3.0 2024.3.0 12.6.37 12.6 (Based on GDB 13.2)
Gilbreth 12.1.1 2023.1.2 2023.1.1 2023.1.1 12.1.105 12.1 (Based on GDB 12.1)
Scholar 12.1.0 2024.4.2 2024.3.0 2024.3.0 12.6.37 12.6 (Based on GDB 13.2)

Where to Find Nsight Tools

When you load a CUDA module, the NVIDIA Nsight tools path will be set depending on the CUDA module you are loading. After loading the CUDA module, you can find the corresponding Nsight tools using commands like which nsys. For example, here is the path on Gautschi:

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$ ml spider cuda
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  cuda: cuda/12.6.0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Other possible modules matches:
        cuda-quantum

    This module can be loaded directly: module load cuda/12.6.0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  To find other possible module matches execute:
      $ module -r spider '.*cuda.*'

$ ml cuda/12.6.0
$ which nsys
/apps/gautschi/cuda/12.6/bin/nsys

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