Blog
December 3, 2019
Powerful CUDA Debugging Support
With its latest release,TotalView now supports NVIDIA CUDA debugging for applications utilizing NVIDIA CUDA GPUs on ARM64 servers. This added capability builds on TotalView’s already powerful CUDA debugging support for the Linux x86 64-bit and Linux PowerLE (Power8 and Power9) platforms.
This is good news for developers using the CUDA parallel programming model to develop applications. In addition to harnessing the speed of NVIDIA GPUs to speed up their applications, now they can accelerate their development process as well, using TotalView’s powerful debugging tool to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues.
ARM64 and GPU Debugging Support Now Available
Since the CUDA debugging API is used consistently across both platforms, adding ARM64 and GPU debugging support to TotalView was a fairly easy development effort. To enable GPU debugging support for the ARM64 platform, the TotalView development team was able to leverage our existing debugging support for Linux ARM64 technologies, including Marvell’s ThunderX2. Initial development was done on the ARM64/Volta GPU-based NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier system.
Jetson AGX Xavier offers amazing compute capabilities at the fraction of the size and cost of a workstation, making it a perfect fit for a variety of autonomous machine applications. It’s also a great representation for the coming generation of ARM64/GPU compute servers.
The development team was able to easily add CUDA GPU debugging support simply by enabling it within ARM64. All CUDA debugging API calls worked the same as other platforms. Debugging of CUDA regions running on the GPU kernel worked as expected. The only challenge encountered during the porting was the requirement to debug targets as root or sudo; this is a limitation of the current Xavier solution and not an issue in ARM64/GPU server platforms. The TotalView solution was tested on ARM64/GPU compute servers and provided the same level of high-performance GPU debugging support on each.
CUDA Developers Continue to Rely on TotalView
With the addition of GPU debugging support on ARM64, CUDA developers can continue relying on TotalView to provide the best GPU debugging solution for their applications. TotalView will continue to aggressively support CUDA advancements across all supported NVIDIA GPU-based architectures.
In addition, we will keep moving forward to ensure advanced debugging support for a variety of CUDA-based applications, from autonomous machine applications running on Jetson Xavier, to large scale multi-GPU HPC applications.