NVTOP: An htop like monitoring tool for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux

2 min read

People started using htop when the top just didn’t provide enough information. Now there is NVTOP, a tool that looks similar to htop but displays the process information loaded on your NVIDIA GPU. It works on Linux systems and displays detailed information about processes, memory used, which GPU and also displays the total GPU and memory usage.

The first version of this tool was released in July last year. The latest change made the process list and command options scrollable.

Some of the features of NVTOP are:

Sorting by column
To Select / Ignore a specific GPU by ID
To kill selected process
Monochrome option

Yes, it has multi GPU support and can display the running processes from all of your GPUs. The information printed out looks like the following, and is similar to something htop would display.

Source: GitHub

There is also a manual page to give some guidance in using NVTOP. It can be accessed with this command:

man nvtop

There are OS specific installation steps on GitHub for Ubuntu/Debian, Fedora/RedHat/CentOS, OpenSUSE, and Arch Linux.

Requirements

There are two libraries needed to build and run NVTOP:

The NVIDIA Management Library (NVML) for querying GPU information.
The ncurses library for the user interface and make it colorful.

Supported GPUs

The NVTOP tool works only for NVIDIA GPUs and runs on Linux systems. One of the dependencies is the NVML library which does not support some queries from GPUs before the Kepler microarchitecture. That is anything before GeForce 600 series, GeForce 700 series, or GeForce 800M wouldn’t likely work. For AMD users, there is a tool called radeontop.

The tool is provided under the GPLV3 license. For more details, head on to the NVTOP GitHub repository.