What is nvidia-smi?
This command line utility is used to query and manage the state of the GPU exposed by the NVML management libraries. Its outputs, a sample of which appears below, are familiar to users of NVIDIA GPUs to the point of being a meme .
nvidia-smi
reports the following:
- GPU identity information like the card's model name, a UUID, and the PCI ID
- live utilization metrics for kernel execution time and memory allocation
- live power and thermal information
For details on these metrics, including how to interpret power and thermal readings, see this page on the Modal docs .
nvidia-smi
can also list processes currently using the GPU (-q
, --query
,
pmon
). Common management tasks include setting persistence mode (-pm
),
compute mode (-c
), power limits (-pl
), application/locked clocks (-ac
,
-lgc
, -lmc
), and performing GPU resets (-r
).
Output can be formatted as human-readable text or XML (-x
). While
nvidia-smi
's text output format is not guaranteed to be stable, the underlying
NVML C library offers a stable API for tool
development.
The documentation for nvidia-smi
can be found
here , and the official Python
bindings can be found here .
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 550.90.07 Driver Version: 550.90.07 CUDA Version: 12.4 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3 On | 00000000:53:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 25C P0 92W / 700W | 1MiB / 81559MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 1 NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3 On | 00000000:64:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 27C P0 93W / 700W | 1MiB / 81559MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 2 NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3 On | 00000000:75:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 26C P0 96W / 700W | 1MiB / 81559MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 3 NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3 On | 00000000:86:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 27C P0 93W / 700W | 1MiB / 81559MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 4 NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3 On | 00000000:97:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 27C P0 95W / 700W | 1MiB / 81559MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 5 NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3 On | 00000000:A8:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 25C P0 91W / 700W | 1MiB / 81559MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 6 NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3 On | 00000000:B9:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 26C P0 91W / 700W | 1MiB / 81559MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 7 NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3 On | 00000000:CA:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 24C P0 91W / 700W | 1MiB / 81559MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
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