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 575.57.08 Driver Version: 575.57.08 CUDA Version: 12.9 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 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 B200 On | 00000000:51:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 27C P0 136W / 1000W | 0MiB / 183359MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 1 NVIDIA B200 On | 00000000:52:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 25C P0 140W / 1000W | 0MiB / 183359MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 2 NVIDIA B200 On | 00000000:62:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 27C P0 138W / 1000W | 0MiB / 183359MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 3 NVIDIA B200 On | 00000000:63:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 26C P0 138W / 1000W | 0MiB / 183359MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 4 NVIDIA B200 On | 00000000:75:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 27C P0 139W / 1000W | 0MiB / 183359MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 5 NVIDIA B200 On | 00000000:76:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 25C P0 140W / 1000W | 0MiB / 183359MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 6 NVIDIA B200 On | 00000000:86:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 27C P0 142W / 1000W | 0MiB / 183359MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| 7 NVIDIA B200 On | 00000000:87:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 26C P0 138W / 1000W | 0MiB / 183359MiB | 0% Default |
| | | Disabled |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
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