Asight Compute quick start-ZHENWU PPU Cloud Service(ppu)-阿里云帮助中心

1. Overview

Asight Compute is a kernel profiler for PPU applications. It collects and displays metrics during kernel execution to help you optimize kernel performance. Asight Compute consists of two tools:

The acu command-line tool: Collects kernel metrics and generates reports. It runs on the Linux platform.
The Asight Compute GUI tool: Displays reports. It supports Windows and macOS. The Asight Compute GUI tool provides multiple views for displaying metrics, such as Roofline Chart, Bar Chart, and Memory Table. It also supports baseline comparison and is designed for ease of use.

The workflow for using the Asight Compute tools is as follows:

Use the acu command-line tool to profile a target application and generate a report.
Open the report in the Asight Compute GUI tool for analysis.

2. Obtain and install

The tools are pre-installed on official images and require no additional setup.

2.1 Configure the acu CLI

Set environment variables
Navigate to the PPU SDK directory and run the following script to set the environment variables:
```
source envsetup.sh
```
Verify the environment
To view help for acu, run:
```
acu -h
```
Tip: Running acu without any arguments also displays the help documentation.
To check the acu version, run:
```
acu -v
```

2.2 Obtain the Asight Compute GUI tool

The Asight Compute GUI tool supports the following operating system versions:

Windows 10, Windows 11
macOS 10.15 or later

Click the download link to open the download page. Select the version you need. Download the MSI installer for Windows or the DMG installer for macOS.

Note

You need an account and password to download the software package. Contact your customer manager (PDSA) to request access.

3. Quick start

This guide refers to the device that runs the PPU application as the target and the device used to view reports as the host.

The Asight Compute workflow involves using the acu command-line tool on the target to collect a report, and then opening it in the Asight Compute GUI tool on the host for analysis.

3.1 Collect reports with acu

Use the acu command-line tool to launch your target application and collect its performance data. When the application finishes, acu generates a report file.

The syntax for acu is: acu [options] <application> [application args]

For example, to collect performance data for all kernel launches in a target application, run the following command:

acu -o test_report -f python test_linear.py

-o test_report specifies the output report name. You do not need to specify the file extension.
-f forces the tool to overwrite an existing file with the same name.
python test_linear.py is the command to run the application.

When the application finishes, acu generates a report file. In this example, the file is named test_report.acurep.

acu provides options to specify which kernels to profile. The -c, --launch-count option limits the number of kernel launches to collect, -s, --launch-skip skips a specified number of launches before starting data collection, and -k, --kernel-name filters kernels by matching their names with a regular expression. For more information, see Filtering kernels.

To limit the data collected for each kernel launch, use --set to specify a collection set. By default, acu collects the sections associated with the default set. Use --list-sets to view a list of available sets. Use --section to specify an exact *.section file by its identifier. Use --list-sections to view a list of available sections. Use --metrics to collect a specific group of metrics. Use --query-metrics to query available metrics. For more information, see Specify the set of metrics to collect.

acu also supports multiple replay modes. For more information, see Specify replay mode.

In addition to saving results to a report file, acu can also print results to the console using different pages. These pages correspond to the report views in the Asight Compute GUI tool. If an output file is not explicitly specified with -o, the details page is printed by default. To select a different page, or to print a page while also saving to a file, use the --page=<Page> command. The following pages are currently supported: details, raw.

3.2 Viewing reports

Reports generated by acu have the .acurep file extension and can be viewed in the Asight Compute GUI tool. You can open files in the GUI tool in the following ways:

From the main menu: File->Open...
Drag and drop the file into the main window of the Asight Compute GUI tool.
From the context menu: Right-click in an empty area of the Project Explorer and select Open...
From the command line, for example: acu-ui report.acurep

Report files (.acurep) are self-contained and can be shared with other users. However, the Asight Compute suite version used to view a report must be the same as or newer than the version used to generate it. The GUI tool displays a warning if you try to open a report that was generated by a newer version of the command-line tool.

For more information about the Asight Compute GUI tool, see Asight Compute GUI tool.