gputrc2graph.py

This script processes NVIDIA Nsight Systems (nsys) GPU trace files (.nsys-rep) with -t cuda tracing enabled, and generates kernel-level summaries and visualizations of GPU and non-GPU time. It is useful for profiling and analyzing nsys profile output.

Usage

Command-line Arguments

--in_file
(required)
List of input files and their metadata. Each entry should be in the format:
<nsys-rep>,<engine>,<model>,<elapsed_nonprofiled_sec>
- nsys-rep: Path to the .nsys-rep file.
- engine: Engine name (e.g., vllm).
- model: Model name (e.g., llama, gpt-oss, ds).
- elapsed_nonprofiled_sec: Wall-clock runtime (in seconds) without profiling. Specify 0 to use the elapsed time from the nsys-rep file (this may inflate non-GPU time if actual runtime without profiling is less). Multiple entries can be provided, separated by spaces.
--out_dir
Output directory for the generated CSV and HTML files.
If not specified, results are saved in the current directory.
--title
Title for the HTML chart/visualization.
--nsys_cmd
Path to the nsys command.
Default: nsys (assumes it is in your PATH).
Use this if nsys is not in your system PATH.

Notes

Make sure you have pandas installed.
Make sure nsys is installed, and specify the path to the nsys command with --nsys_cmd if it is not in your PATH.
For more details on available engines and models, see the help string in the script or run:

bash

python3 gputrc2graph.py --help

Example 1: analyze a single profile

To analyze the GPU cycles for say, gpt-oss model with vLLM engine:

Run the following command to collect nsys profile, for vllm serve config.
bash
```
nsys profile -t cuda -o run1 -f true --trace-fork-before-exec=true \
--cuda-graph-trace=node --delay <DELAY> --duration <DURATION> \
vllm serve openai/gpt-oss-120b ...
```
where:
- DELAY: how many seconds to delay nsys from collecting profiles, needed so that profiles aren't captured till vllm server has come up and load generation starts.
- DURATION: how many seconds for nsys profile to run before generating the profile. This should be > the duration of the run.
Run again, this time without collecting the profile, and get the total run time in seconds. This value will be used by the script to calculate the CPU(non-GPU) seconds for the analysis.

Say the run elapsed time is 306 seconds, from step #2. Run script to analyze:

bash

python3 gputrc2graph.py \
--in_file run1.nsys-rep,vllm,gpt-oss,306 \
--title "vLLM-gpt-oss profile"

The command will produce 2 files for analysis:

result.html: this categorizes kernel names into different categories in a stacked bar chart.
result.csv: shows how the kernel names are mapped to the different categories.

HTML visualization with result.html

The html file shows the number of elapsed seconds due to different GPU Substages or categories, which consist of moe_gemm (Mixture of Experts GEMM) kernels the biggest category, at 148 seconds, followed by "attn" or attention kernels. This lets the user prioritize the kernels to focus on for performance optimizations.

There's also an appended data table underneath the bar chart for copying out to other post-processing tools.

Kernel to category mapping with result.csv

Suppose the user would like to focus on improving triton kernels. It's not the biggest consumer of cycles at 9.74 sec but perhaps it hasn't been optimized. The next step is to use the result.csv to dive into what the kernels are which compose the triton kernel GPU cycles. The following image shows that triton_poi_fused__to_copy_add_addmm_cat_.. kernel to be the biggest contributor to GPU cycles.

Example 2: analyze multiple profiles

Suppose the user has multiple nsys trace files, captured for different models, say llama and gpt-oss in this case, and wish to compare their GPU/non-GPU time, something like the following command can be used.

bash

python3 gputrc2graph.py \
--in_file run1.nsys-rep,vllm,llama,100 run2.nsys-rep,vllm,gpt-oss,102 \
--out_dir results \
--title "Comparison of vLLM Models"

The analysis process is similar to example 1 but now there will be multiple stack bar charts that can be compared. The categories for the different kernels will remain the same, so that it's easy to compare the GPU cycles for the same categories.

Once a category is shown to have more cycles for one configuration than another, the next step would be to use the csv file to see what kernels are mapped into that category, and which kernels are taking the largest amount of time which would cause a difference for the overall category.

Example 3: add new classification for a new model

To create a new engine DEF with model ABC, just add another json file in the same directory as gputrc2graph.py with the same format as the other json files. The script will automatically pick up all the json files in the same directory as engine/model specifications.

Then, for this new model, suppose there are 4 kernels to be classified into "gemm" and "attn", where the gemm kernels have names with "H" or "I" in them, and attn kernels have names with "J" or "K" in them, just add another .json file in the same directory as gputrc2graph.py with the same format as the other json files, like the following:

json

{
  "DEF": {
      "ABC": { 
          "H|I": "gemm",
          "J|K": "attn",
          "CUDA mem": "non-gpu-H_D_memops",
          ".*": "misc"
      }
  }
}

Each entry in the dictionary consists of:

key: a regex used to classify the kernels
value: the category to classify the kernels into.

The last 2 entries are common for all engine/models, consisting of CUDA memory operations and a 'misc' for anything that's leftover and can't be classified.

When invoking gputrc2graph.py, specify a trace file with this new model/engine like the following:

bash

--infile new.nsys-rep,DEF,ABC,<runtime>

If the engine_DEF.json file already exists, just add the model as a new node in the existing engine file, after the other models.