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Performance Analysis

Quick Start: Efficiency Report with seff

Slurm job efficiency report (command: seff) gives a quick summary of requested and used resources for both running and finished batch jobs.

seff <JOBID>

It is an easy way to get an overall picture of how efficiently the CPUs were used (CPU Efficiency) and how much of the allocated memory was actually used (Memory Efficiency).

Hint

you may add the seff command to the end of your batch job script to always get an efficiency report for your jobs: seff $SLURM_JOBID

Example output for a single node job: 

puhti-login12:~$ seff 366910
Job ID: 366910
Cluster: puhti
User/Group: louhivuo/louhivuo
State: COMPLETED (exit code 0)
Nodes: 1
Cores per node: 40
CPU Utilized: 01:13:41
CPU Efficiency: 94.47% of 01:18:00 core-walltime
Job Wall-clock time: 00:01:57
Memory Utilized: 22.13 GB (estimated maximum)
Memory Efficiency: 14.16% of 156.25 GB (3.91 GB/core)
Job consumed 1.81 CSC billing units based on following used resources
CPU BU: 1.30
Mem BU: 0.51

To get more detailed information about the performance of your program, you should use one of the profiling tools available (see below).

Profiling tools

Good profiling tools may help one to get a full picture of the computational and communication patterns of a program and to identify potential performance bottlenecks. At CSC, several profiling tools are available:

  • Intel VTune Profiler is a powerful profiler that can be used to collect performance data of your application and is suited for both serial and multithreaded codes
  • Scalasca is trace-based parallel performance analysis tool for MPI, OpenMP and hybrid MPI+OpenMP programs
  • Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector is a MPI profiling and tracing tool for parallel programs
  • cProfile is the recommended, in-built profiling tool for Python programs
  • nvprof is a command-line CUDA profiler and tracing tool for CUDA programs
  • nsys is the command-line interface of Nsight Systems a system-wide performance analysis tool designed to visualize an application’s algorithms
  • ncu is the command-line interface of Nsight Compute, a tool to debug and optimize CUDA kernels
Last update: October 13, 2022