1. Introduction

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

These tools are in the bin directory of the Poplar SDK installation, typically poplar-os_name-version/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.

gc-docker

Allows you to use PCIe-based IPU devices in Docker containers.

gc-info

Determines what IPU cards are present in the system.

gc-inventory

Lists device IDs, physical parameters and firmware version numbers.

gc-links

Displays the status and connectivity of each of the IPU-Links that connect IPUs. See also IPU-Link channel mapping for connectivity in an IPU Server containing C2 cards.

gc-monitor

Monitors IPU activity on shared systems.

gc-reset

Resets IPU devices.

gc-exchangetest

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

gc-hostsynclatencytest

Reports the latency of transfers between the host machine and the IPUs (in both directions).

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-memorytest

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

gc-powertest

Tests power consumption and temperature of the IPU processors.

Some of these commands reference IPU devices by their ID. The ID mapping is shown in PCIe Device IDs and channel map.

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