The NVIDIA System Management Interface (nvidia-smi) is a command line utility, based on top of the NVIDIA Management Library (NVML), intended to aid in the management and monitoring of NVIDIA GPU devices. 

This utility allows administrators to query GPU device state and with the appropriate privileges, permits administrators to modify GPU device state.  It is targeted at the Tesla(TM) and Fermi-based Quadro(TM) devices, though limited support is also available on other NVIDIA GPUs.

Nvidia-smi ships with NVIDIA GPU display drivers on Linux, and with 64bit Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. Nvidia-smi can report query information as XML or human readable plain text to either standard output or a file. For more details, please refer to the nvidia-smi man page.

Example nvidia-smi output

==============NVSMI LOG==============

Timestamp                       : Tue Oct 11 14:48:31 2011

Driver Version                  : 270.41.19

Attached GPUs                   : 3

GPU 0:6:0
    Product Name                : Tesla M2090
    Display Mode                : Disabled
    Persistence Mode            : Disabled
    Driver Model
        Current                 : N/A
        Pending                 : N/A
    Serial Number               : 0321510021000
    GPU UUID                    : GPU-a4d1c4f0069acc05
    Inforom Version
        OEM Object              : 1.1
        ECC Object              : 2.0
        Power Management Object : 4.0
    PCI
        Bus                     : 6
        Device                  : 0
        Domain                  : 0
        Device Id               : 109110DE
        Bus Id                  : 0:6:0
    Fan Speed                   : N/A
    Memory Usage
        Total                   : 6143 Mb
        Used                    : 10 Mb
        Free                    : 6132 Mb
    Compute Mode                : Default
    Utilization
        Gpu                     : 0 %
        Memory                  : 0 %
    Ecc Mode
        Current                 : Enabled
        Pending                 : Enabled
    ECC Errors
        Volatile
            Single Bit            
                Device Memory   : 0
                Register File   : 0
                L1 Cache        : 0
                L2 Cache        : 0
                Total           : 0
            Double Bit            
                Device Memory   : 0
                Register File   : 0
                L1 Cache        : 0
                L2 Cache        : 0
                Total           : 0
        Aggregate
            Single Bit            
                Device Memory   : 0
                Register File   : 0
                L1 Cache        : 0
                L2 Cache        : 0
                Total           : 0
            Double Bit            
                Device Memory   : 0
                Register File   : 0
                L1 Cache        : 0
                L2 Cache        : 0
                Total           : 0
    Temperature
        Gpu                     : N/A
    Power Readings
        Power State             : P12
        Power Management        : Supported
        Power Draw              : 35.73 W
        Power Limit             : 225 W
    Clocks
        Graphics                : 50 MHz
        SM                      : 100 MHz
        Memory                  : 135 MHz