Profiling CUDA UVM host device memory transfers using Caliper

David Poliakoff's experimental branch of the Caliper profiling library can track the automatic transfers of UVM pages between host and device. Caliper is a standalone dynamic library that conforms to the Kokkos profiling interface. It can do much more than just UVM tracking, but these instructions are only about UVM.

Limitation: doesn't work with MPI yet, but full support of MPI in the Tpetra stack is in progress.

Installation

module load $cuda_stuff

Build your app with -DKokkos_ENABLE_PROFILING=ON, but otherwise the usual CUDA configuration Recommended to have -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug to have accurate kernel names in backtraces.

Download Caliper and checkout UVM branch (this is an experimental extension to https://github.com/LLNL/Caliper):

git clone [email protected]:DavidPoliakoff/caliper
cd caliper
git checkout feature/uvm

Build and install caliper - the install prefix can be anywhere. Here it's called $CALIPER_ROOT.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DWITH_KOKKOS_PROFILING=ON -DWITH_CUPTI=ON  -DCUDA_TOOLKIT_ROOT_DIR=$CUDA_ROOT -DCUPTI_PREFIX=$CUDA_ROOT/extras/CUPTI -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$CALIPER_ROOT ..
make install

Basic usage: list kernels, views, transfer direction and size in bytes

export KOKKOS_PROFILE_LIBRARY=$CALIPER_ROOT/lib64/libcaliper-serial.so
export CALI_CALIPER_ATTRIBUTE_DEFAULT_SCOPE=process
export CALI_LOG_VERBOSITY=1
export CALI_REPORT_CONFIG="SELECT SUM(cupti.uvm.bytes),* GROUP BY alloc.label#cupti.uvm.address,cupti.uvm.direction,function FORMAT TABLE"
export CALI_ALLOC_RESOLVE_ADDRESSES=TRUE

Now, just run a program that uses Kokkos+CUDA+UVM. After Kokkos is finalized, Caliper will print out a report. Here is an example line from running the TpetraExt MatrixMatrix unit tests:

KokkosSparse::StructureC::GPU_EXEC   BYTES_TRANSFER_HTOD   98304   Tpetra::CrsMatrix::val

This 4-column format (defined in $CALI_REPORT_CONFIG) has the demangled kernel/functor name, the transfer direction (here, host to device), the total number of bytes transferred, and the Kokkos::View label.

The reported byte count is a sum over all the times the transfer happened in the same kernel, on the same view in the same transfer direction.