Deep Dive into nvidia-smi: Monitoring Your NVIDIA GPU with Real Examples
Whether you're training deep learning models, running simulations, or just curious about your GPU's performance, nvidia-smi is your go-to command-line tool. Short for NVIDIA System Management Interface, this utility provides essential real-time information about your NVIDIA GPU’s health, workload, and performance.
In this blog, we’ll explore what nvidia-smi is, how to use it, and walk through a real output from a system using an NVIDIA T1000 8GB GPU.
What is nvidia-smi?
nvidia-smi is a CLI utility bundled with the NVIDIA driver. It enables:
- Real-time GPU monitoring
- Driver and CUDA version discovery
- Process visibility and control
- GPU configuration and performance tuning
You can execute it using:
nvidia-smi