Using Nsight Systems with HTGS

The HTGS API supports visualizing a task graph using the Nsight Systems visualization tool. Nsight Systems is a powerful tool to show a timeline of the execution of a process and visualize how HTGS tasks and graphs interact.

Dependencies:

1. The NVTX3 header-only API
2. Lib dl

Compilation Instructions:

To enable NVTX profiling add the following directive during compilation (for graphs with less than 25 tasks):

-DUSE_NVTX

To profile graphs with more than 24 tasks add the following directives during compilation:

-DUSE_NVTX
-DUSE_MINIMAL_NVTX

For convenience, we have included the FindNVTX.cmake cmake module example usage:

find_package(NVTX QUIET)

if(NVTX_FOUND)
    message(STATUS "FOUND NVTX!")
    add_definitions(-DUSE_NVTX)
    include_directories(${NVTX_INCLUDE_DIR})
    link_libraries(${NVTX_LIBRARIES})
endif()

With the FindNVXT.cmake script, you can specify the NVTX_INCLUDE_DIR when reloading cmake.

How to run with Nsight Systems

Within Nsight Systems there are two tools:

1. The visualization program nsight-sys
2. The profiling execution program nsys or quadd_d

After compiling HTGS with NVTX enabled, you can profile your application with the following command:

nsys profile -t nvtx -s cpu -d <time in seconds to profile> -w <true/false to show output> </path/to/executable>

nsys profile -t nvtx -s cpu -d 5 -w true /path/to/executable

By default, this will generate a report file in $HOME$/nvidia_nsight_systems/report#.qdsrtm.

This file can then be imported using nsight-sys to visualize.