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Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop

systalyze.com

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Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop

#1
The standard GPU utilization metric reported by nvidia-smi, nvtop, Weights & Biases, Amazon CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, and Azure Monitor is highly misleading. It reports the fraction of time that any kernel is running on the GPU, which means a GPU can report 100% utilization even if only a small portion of its compute capacity is actually being used. In practice, we've seen workloads with ~1–10% real compute throughput while dashboards show 100%.

This becomes a problem when teams rely on that metric for capacity planning or optimization decisions, it can make underutilized systems look saturated.

We're releasing an open-source (Apache 2.0) tool, Utilyze, to measure GPU utilization differently. It samples hardware performance counters and reports compute and memory throughput relative to the hardware's theoretical limits. It also estimates an attainable utilization ceiling for a given workload.

GitHub link: https://github.com/systalyze/utilyze

We'd love to hear your thoughts!

Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop
systalyze.com

Re: Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop

#2
One small suggestion: add more GPU stats to your tool.

At the moment (v0.1.3) it is more helpful for compute visualization but keeping track of memory usage/processes/temperature/fan speed/etc. prevent this from becoming a full-on drop-in replacement for `nvidia-smi` for me.

Re: Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop

#5

One small suggestion: add more GPU stats to your tool. At the moment (v0.1.3) it is more helpful for compute visualization but keeping track of memory usage/processes/temperature/fan speed/etc. prevent this from becoming a full-on drop-in replacement for `nvidia-smi` for me.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop

#7
There's a few dimensions you can look at for gpu load. Probably the easiest indirect metric to watch for gpu load is power usage.

But if you really care about this, you should actually profile your application. nsight systems makes this pretty simple to do. Dunno how many actually care about having a TUI.

Re: Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop

#8

One small suggestion: add more GPU stats to your tool. At the moment (v0.1.3) it is more helpful for compute visualization but keeping track of memory usage/processes/temperature/fan speed/etc. prevent this from becoming a full-on drop-in replacement for `nvidia-smi` for me.

We agree! We are planning a "process" or "advanced" view with temp/power usage and per-process breakdowns. Would a separate full page view or fitting everything onto one view be more useful for your workflows? Just thinking about fitting everything in because it is a lot

Re: Show HN: Utilyze – an open source GPU monitoring tool more accurate than nvtop

#10
post #4

Hi, many thx, does the os can run on nvidia jetson and orin? Or just for server gpu?

Currently just server GPU, but theoretically it should be easy to link against the ARM64 CUDA libraries for Jetson/Orin. The only challenge would be to check if it supports all the metrics we're sampling, though anything Ampere or newer should have reasonable support.
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