Intel® Advisor User Guide

ID 766448
Date 3/22/2024
Public

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Document Table of Contents

Set Up System to Analyze GPU Kernels

To analyze performance of GPU kernels in your SYCL, OpenMP* target, or OpenCL™ application with the GPU Roofline Insights or GPU-to-GPU Offload Modeling perspective, you need to configure your system properly:

  1. Make sure you have the Intel® Metrics Discovery Application Programming Interface. The library is included with the Intel® Advisor.
  2. Install and configure a graphics processing unit (GPU) driver for your system.
  3. For Linux* OS: Set up environment variables.
IMPORTANT:
For the Offload Modeling perspective, make sure the kernels run with the oneAPI Level Zero back end.

Install Intel® Metrics Discovery Application Programming Interface

To collect GPU hardware metrics and GPU utilization data, Intel Advisor uses the Intel Metric Discovery Application Programming Interface library. This library is delivered with the Intel Advisor. If you already have the library installed and you want to use your local library, make sure you have the correct version as explained below.

NOTE:
If you see the Cannot Collect GPU Hardware Metrics for the Selected GPU Adapter error message, install the library as follows. The message means the Intel Advisor cannot access the library.

Windows* OS

Intel Metric Discovery Application Programming Interface library is part of a GPU driver package. You should have a driver version higher than 27.20.100.8280 for your system.

If you have a lower version of the driver, you can download it from https://downloadcenter.intel.com/.

Linux* OS

Intel Metrics Discovery Application Programming Interface library is supported on Linux OS with kernel version 4.14 or higher. You should have the Intel Metric Discovery Application Programming Interface library 1.6.0 or higher to support the selection of video adapters.

If you have a lower version of the library, you can build and install it from https://github.com/intel/metrics-discovery.

Install a GPU driver

To collect GPU hardware metrics, install Intel® software packages for general purpose GPU capabilities.

On Windows OS, install a GPU driver for your system from Download Center.

On Linux OS, follows the instructions in the GPGPU Installation Guides to install and configure drivers for your operating system.

Set Up Environment Variables

On Windows OS, run the Survey step of the perspective as an Administrator.

On Linux OS, run the Survey step of the perspective with root privileges.

If you do not have root permissions on Linux OS, enable collecting GPU hardware metrics for non-privileged users as follows:

  1. Add your username to the video group.
    1. To check if you are already in the video group, run:
      groups | grep video
    2. If you are not part of the video group, add your username to it:
      sudo usermod -a -G video <username>
    3. Type groups to verify that you successfully added your username to the video group . If video is not listed, log out and log back in.
  2. For Ubuntu* 19.10 and higher: Add your username to the render group.
    1. To check if you are already in the render group, run:
      groups | grep render
    2. If you are not part of the render group, add your username to it:
      sudo usermod -a -G render <username>
    3. Type groups to verify that you successfully added your username to the render group . If render is not listed, log out and log back in.
  3. Set the value of the dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid sysctl option to 0:
    sysctl -w dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0
    NOTE:
    This command makes a temporary change that is lost on the next reboot. To change this option permanently, run:
    echo dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0 > /etc/sysctl.d/60-mdapi.conf 
  4. Open the grub file in the /etc/default directory.
  5. Find GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and type i915.enable_hangcheck=0 between the "" to disable time limit and run OpenCL™ kernel for a longer period of time. Save the file and close.
  6. Run the following command to update the configuration:
    sudo update-grub

Next Steps

See Also