/NVBit

NVBit is released as an artifact via github, it can be downloaded at: https://github.com/NVlabs/NVBit/releases

A paper describing NVBit was published at MICRO 2019 and it can be found at: https://github.com/NVlabs/NVBit/releases/download/v1.0/MICRO_19_NVBit.pdf

For business inquiries, please visit our website and submit the form: NVIDIA Research Licensing

NVBit (NVidia Binary Instrumentation Tool)

NVIDIA Corporation

NVBit is covered by the same End User License Agreement as that of the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit. By using NVBit you agree to End User License Agreement described in the EULA.txt file.

NVBit is not part of the official CUDA toolkit, but instead is a research prototype from the Architecture Research Group at NVIDIA and as such is provided as-is with no guarantee of support.

Introduction

NVBit (NVidia Binary Instrumentation Tool) is a research prototype of a dynamic binary instrumentation library for NVIDIA GPUs.

NVBit provides a set of simple APIs that enable writing a variety of instrumentation tools. Example of instrumentation tools are: dynamic instruction counters, instruction tracers, memory reference tracers, profiling tools, etc.

NVBit allows writing instrumentation tools (which we call NVBit tools) that can inspect and modify the assembly code (SASS) of a GPU application without requiring recompilation, thus dynamic. NVBit allows instrumentation tools to inspect the SASS instructions of each function (__global__ or __device__) as it is loaded for the first time in the GPU. During this phase is possible to inject one or more instrumentation calls to arbitrary device functions before (or after) a SASS instruction. It is also possible to remove SASS instructions, although in this case NVBit does not guarantee that the application will continue to work correctly.

NVBit tries to be as low overhead as possible, although any injection of instrumentation function has an associated cost due to saving and restoring application state before and after jumping to/from the instrumentation function.

Because NVBit does not require application source code, any pre-compiled GPU application should work regardless of which compiler (or version) has been used (i.e. nvcc, pgicc, etc).

Requirements

  • SM compute capability: >= 3.5 && <= 8.6
  • Host CPU: x86_64, ppc64le, arm64
  • OS: Linux
  • GCC version: >= 5.3.0
  • CUDA version: >= 8.0 && <= 11.x
  • CUDA driver version: <= 495.xx
  • nvcc version for tool compilation >= 10.2

ARM64 version is tested on Jetson TX2 and Jetson Nano with JetPack 4.4.