1. Introduction

The IPU driver software includes a number of software tools that provide information on the current status of the connected hardware.

These tools are provided as part of the Poplar SDK and as a standalone driver package. The tools are in the bin directory of the installation, typically gc_drivers-ubuntu-[ver]/bin. To set up your environment to use the tools, you will need to source the enable.sh script provided in that directory:

$ source enable.sh

The commands available are listed below. Note that not all commands are appropriate for all IPU systems. For example, some commands may not be available, or may have no effect, on cloud-based systems. Refer to the Getting Started Guide for the IPU system you are using for a list of supported commands.

gc-info

Determines what IPU cards are present in the system.

gc-inventory

Lists device IDs, physical parameters and firmware version numbers.

gc-reset

Resets an IPU device after reboot.

gc-monitor

Monitors IPU activity on shared systems.

gc-exchangetest

Allows you to test the internal exchange fabric in an IPU.

gc-memorytest

Tests all the memory in an IPU, reporting any tiles that fail.

gc-links

Displays the status and connectivity of each of the IPU-Links that connect the C2 IPU-Processor cards together. See also IPU-Link channel mapping.

gc-powertest

Tests power consumption and temperature of the C2 IPU-Processor cards.

gc-hosttraffictest

Allows you to test the data transfer between the host machine and the IPUs (in both directions).

gc-iputraffictest

Allows you to test the data transfer between IPUS.

gc-docker

Allows you to use IPU devices in Docker containers.

Many of these commands reference IPU devices by their ID. The ID mapping is shown in Device IDs and Channel Map.

The use and output of each of these tools is described in the following sections.