NAV: A Comparative Analysis Tool for Nsight Systems GPU Traces

High-performance computing (HPC) and data centers increasingly rely on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in large supercomputers. Yet, this reliance poses challenges in quickly understanding the performance impacts of code changes. This paper introduces NAV, a versatile tool designed to rapidly analyze and compare GPU performance traces. Built upon NVIDIA’s Nsight^TM Systems (NSYS), NAV enhances NSYS’s capabilities by accelerating visualization for large traces, increasing the variety of data representation formats, and adding comparative analysis capabilities. Our tool, NAV, provides complimentary functions on top of NSYS to quickly access performance data and perform comparative analysis. NAV offers detailed visual and written representations of traces at various granularity levels and efficiently handles large trace files through parallelization. It extracts trace data 1.15 to 3.5 times faster than comparable NSYS recipes for typical developer trace sizes, automating the generation of valuable data representations and streamlining workload analysis. This paper outlines NAV’s key features and functionalities, demonstrating its effectiveness through use cases that highlight its benefits for rapid application analysis and assessing the impact of code changes.