NVIDIA Nsight Systems
NVIDIA® Nsight™ Systems is a system-wide performance analysis tool designed to visualize an application’s algorithms, help you identify the largest opportunities to optimize, and tune to scale efficiently across any quantity or size of CPUs and GPUs; from large server to our smallest SoC.
Overview
NVIDIA Nsight Systems is a low overhead performance analysis tool designed to provide insights developers need to optimize their software. Unbiased activity data is visualized within the tool to help users investigate bottlenecks, avoid inferring false-positives, and pursue optimizations with higher probability of performance gains. Users will be able to identify issues, such as GPU starvation, unnecessary GPU synchronization, insufficient CPU parallelizing, and even unexpectedly expensive algorithms across the CPUs and GPUs of their target platform. It is designed to scale across a wide range of NVIDIA platforms such as: large Tesla multi-GPU x86 servers, Quadro workstations, Optimus enabled laptops, DRIVE devices with Tegra+dGPU multi-OS, and Jetson. NVIDIA Nsight Systems can even provide valuable insight into the behaviors and load of deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow; allowing users to tune their models and parameters to increase overall single or multi-GPU utilization.
Platforms
Learn about Nsight Systems on your platform:
Release Highlights
2020.5 - Announcement Post
- NVIDIA Ampere Architecture
- Vulkan Ray tracing final specification
- CUDA memory allocation trace
- NCCL trace
- UX improvements
- Improved selection highlights
- Support for hi-DPI displays
2020.4 - Announcement Post
- NVIDIA Ampere Architecture
- CUDA 11.1
- CUDA memory allocation trace
- Labeled and color coded UVM transfers
- Launch Nsight Compute to profile kernel selected from within Nsight Systems
- Vulkan mGPU and device groups
- Timeline improvements
- Unified OpenGL workloads
- Frame duration statistics
- System wall clock allowing to compare multiple reports
- CLI on Windows
- UX improvements
2020.3 - Announcement Post
- NVIDIA Ampere Architecture
- CUDA 11.0
- CUDA Graph correlation
- OptiX
- Vulkan KHR ray tracing extension
- OpenMP
- CLI improvements
- UX improvements
2020.2 - Announcement Post
- Improved CLI support for
- Power9 Architecture
- ARM Server Base System Architecture
- OpenMP 5
- New CLI stats command
- CPU utilization estimates for more secure environments limiting scheduler info
- UX improvements
- Vulkan1.2 support
- Visual Studio Integration is now available
Downloads
Available for profiling directly on Linux workstations and servers, including the NVIDIA DGX line, or remotely from a variety of hosts: Windows, Linux, or MacOSX.
Learn about other target platforms.
Documentation
Support
To provide feedback, request additional features, or report support issues, please use the Developer Forums.
System Requirements
Supported target operating systems for data collection:
- Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 and 20.04*
- CentOS 7+*
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7+* * For older OS versions, please use Nsight Systems 2020.3
Supported target hardware
- GPU: Pascal or newer
- CPU: x86-64, Arm Server Base System Architecture and Power9 processors* * Intel Haswell architecture or newer is required for LBR sampling backtraces
Supported target software
- 64 bit applications only
- CUDA 10.0+ for CUDA tracing
- Requires driver r418 or newer
Supported host operating systems for data visualization:
- Windows 10+
- macOS X 10.9+
- Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 and 20.04
Release Highlights
2020.5 - Announcement Post
- NVIDIA Ampere Architecture
- Vulkan Ray tracing final specification
- UX improvements
- Improved selection highlights
- Support for hi-DPI displays
2020.4 - Announcement Post
- NVIDIA Ampere Architecture
- CUDA 11.1
- CUDA memory allocation trace
- Labeled and color coded UVM transfers
- Launch Nsight Compute to profile kernel selected from within Nsight Systems
- Vulkan mGPU and device groups
- Timeline improvements
- Unified OpenGL workloads
- Frame duration statistics
- System wall clock allowing to compare multiple reports
- CLI on Windows
- UX improvements
2020.3 - Announcement Post
- NVIDIA Ampere Architecture
- CUDA 11.0
- CUDA Graph correlation
- OptiX
- Vulkan KHR ray tracing extension
- DirectX Raytracing(DXR) Tier 1.1
- UX improvements
2020.2 - Announcement Post
- Direct3D12 multi-GPU support
- Vulkan1.2 support
- Windows video memory timeline improvements
- Usage graph
- Paging queue
- Page eviction events
- Hotkey to insert user annotation markers (NVTX)
- UX improvements
- Visual Studio Integration is now available
Downloads
Available for profiling directly on Linux workstations and servers, including the NVIDIA DGX line, or remotely from a variety of hosts: Windows, Linux, or MacOSX.
Visual Studio Integration*requires Nsights Sytems to be installed
Learn about other target platforms.
Documentation
Support
To provide feedback, request additional features, or report support issues, please use the Developer Forums.
System Requirements
Supported operating systems
- Windows 10
Supported target hardware
- GPU: Pascal or newer
- CPU: x86-64 processors
Supported target software
- 64 bit applications only
- CUDA 10.0+ for CUDA tracing
- Requires driver r418 or newer
Release Highlights
2019.4
- Ftrace collection on Linux
- Event table - alternative view of timeline data
- Improved CUDA memory transfer color scheme
- Android 9 support
- Expanded export capabilities
- New data sources: thread information, cuDNN, cuBLAS
2019.3
- QNX OS runtime backtraces for long blocking functions
- Exporters for SQLite & JSON
- NVTX, CUDA, OS Runtime Trace(OSRT)
Downloads
Nsight Systems is bundled as part of the following product development suites:
Jetson via NVIDIA SDK ManagerDocumentation
Support
To provide feedback, request additional features, or report support issues, please use the Developer Forums.
System Requirements
Supported Target Hardware
- ShieldTV
- Jetson AGX Xavier, Jetson TX2, Jetson TX1
- DRIVE AGX Pegasus, DRIVE AGX Xavier, DRIVE PX Parker AutoChauffeur, DRIVE PX Parker AutoCruise
Supported target operating systems for data collection:
- QNX
- Linux
- Android
Supported host operating systems for data visualization:
- Ubuntu 16.04, and 18.04
Features
Learn about feature support per target platform group
Workstations and Servers |
Workstations and Gaming PCs |
Autonomous Machines |
Autonomous Vehicles |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| View system-wide application behavior across CPUs and GPUs | ||||
| CPU cores utilization, process, & thread activities | ||||
| CPU thread periodic sampling backtraces | ||||
| CPU thread blocked state backtraces | ||||
| CPU performance counter sampling | ||||
| GPU workload trace | ||||
| GPU context switch trace | ||||
| SOC hypervisor trace | ||||
| SOC memory bandwidth sampling | ||||
| SOC Accelerators trace | ||||
| OS Event Trace | ||||
| Investigate CPU-GPU interactions and bubbles | ||||
| User annotations API trace NVIDIA Tools Extension API (NVTX) |
||||
| CUDA API | ||||
| CUDA libraries trace (cuBLAS, cuDNN & TensorRT) | ||||
| OpenGL API trace | ||||
| Vulkan API trace | ||||
| Direct3D12, Direct3D11, DXR, & PIX APIs | ||||
| OptiX | ||||
| Bidirectional correlation of API and GPU workload | ||||
| Identify GPU idle and sparse usage | Multi-GPU Graphics trace | |||
| Ready for big data | ||||
| Fast GUI capable of visualizing in excess of 10 million events on laptops | ||||
| Additional command line collection tool | ||||
| NV-Docker container support | ||||
| NVIDIA GPU Cloud support | ||||
| Minimum user privilege level |
* On Intel Haswell and newer CPU architecture
** Only with OS runtime trace enabled. Some syscalls such as handcrafted assembly may be missed. Backtraces may only appear if time threasholds are exceeded.
What Users Are Saying
Tracxpoint
We noticed that our new Quadro P6000 server was ‘starved’ during training and we needed experts for supporting us. NVIDIA Nsight Systems helped us to achieve over 90 percent GPU utilization. A deep learning model that previously took 600 minutes to train, now takes only 90.
Felix Goldberg, Chief AI Scientist
NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Watch John Stone, present how he achieved over a 3x performance increase in VMD; a popular tool for analyzing large biomolecular systems.Related Media
The 2019.6 release aims to provide a more detailed data collection, exploration, and collection control for all markets ranging from high performance computing to visual effects. 2019.6 introduces new data sources, improved visual data navigation, expanded CLI capabilities, extended export coverage and statistics.
NVIDIA Nsight Systems 2020.1 release adds CLI support for Power9 architecture. The ability to run multiple recording sessions simultaneously in CLI. UX improvements and stats export options in the GUI and CLI.
In the 2020.3 release, Nsight Systems adds ability to analyze applications parallelized using OpenMP.
In the 2019.3 release, Nsight Systems adds the ability to analyze reports using statistics to identify opportunities for improving your GPU-accelerated application.
The 2019.4 release aims to provide a more detailed data collection, exploration, and collection control for all markets ranging from high performance computing to visual effects. 2019.4 introduces new data sources, improved visual data navigation, expanded CLI capabilities, extended export coverage and statistics.
In the 2019.3 release, Nsight Systems adds the ability to trace vulkan on Windows and Linux targets; allowing you to inspect the CPU/GPU relationship and solve complicated frame stuttering issues in your Vulkan application.
Watch John Stone, of the NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discuss how he achieved over a 3x performance increase of VMD, a popular tool for analyzing large biomolecular systems.
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An introduction to the latest NVIDIA System Profiler. Includes an UI workthrough and setup details for NVIDIA System Profiler on the NVIDIA Jetson Embedded Platform. Download and learn more here.