[Mesa-dev] GPU (and system) monitoring

[Gordon Haverland]

Greetings.  I've been lurking a long time.

There is perhaps too much introduction here.

Why I've been lurking was related to OpenCL (and btrfs) issues related
to some upgrading of hardware and software I have on my LAN when time
permitted.  Well, winter arrived and now there isn't quite so much
stuff keeping me away from the computer.

In the near future I will have 5 computers attached to 4 UPS, two of
which will have Corsair digital power supplies.  One computer will have
a sort of deprecated AMD GPU, and the others will have newer hardware
(mostly Polaris GPUs from AMD).  Processors are all AMD.

UPS software (NUT or proprietary) can provide estimates of how much
power the UPS are providing.  Lmsensors seems to have an ability to
read GPU temperatures as well as CPU temperatures.  SMART may give
access to disk data, I am initially thinking that SSD aren't going to
provide anything useful.  And the Gnome libgtop2 library can provide
access to CPU type process data.  There is some code out there to get
at data from Corsair digital power supplies.

Some UPS software is sampling every 2 seconds, some every 15 or 30
seconds.  What I am looking to do, is to sample a bunch of things at
about the same rate and log it (on one machine).  Sample the
temperatures, sample the power levels and then look through the process
statistics to find the N processes that are using more than 10% of any
CPU (core).

Much of what I am doing now, is public BOINC projects.  And these BOINC
projects may be interested in this from an energy budget point of
view.  I have some projects in mind, which a person might be able to do
from a BOINC server.  And I would like to be able to measure the energy
budget on this.

Einstein at Home seems to be one of the few BOINC projects which produces
jobs for which Mesa3D is the OpenCL provider.  I see SETI at Home sending
jobs occasionally, but they don't compile as they assume
Catalyst/fglrx because I have AMD GPUs.

Maybe places like SETI at Home would be inclined to create OpenCL jobs, if
there was software to measure energy budget?  One could hope.

At the moment, I am working in Perl.  For getting at Corsair digital
power supply data, spawning some program via the shell and capturing
output should work for a start, but I probably should try to make a
library and do things via XS.  GTop has a Perl wrapper at CPAN, I don't
think I've seen a Perl wrapper around anything lmsensors related.

Too much introduction, I apologise.

Are there aspects of GPU use; that Mesa3D provides, should provide or
could provide?  Especially with respect to OpenCL.  Are there
places/references where I can learn about this?  No paywalled stuff
please, I have no budget.

If this means writing code (Mesa3D seems to be mostly C, I can do that,
but most of my programming is number crunching in FORTRAN) to submit to
Mesa3D, I can do that.

Other things I should know?

If I get something working, github is best place to put this?  I think
it might be useful at some point.

Have a great day!
Gord