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
Important
If the http_proxy and/or https_proxy environment variables have been
set then you need to add the IP addresses for the IPU-M2000s to the
no_proxy environment variable in order to allow the tools to access
them.
For example, if the subnet address of an IPU-POD is x.y.z, you could set the
no_proxy environment variable using the following command:
$ export no_proxy="$(for k in {1..8}; do echo x.y.z.$k ; done | tr '\n' ',')"
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.
- gc-exchangewritetest
Tests direct writes to the IPU’s tile memory via the host.
- gc-gwlinkstraffictest
Tests GW-Links on multi-rack IPU-POD systems.
- gc-flops
Allows you to benchmark the number of floating point operations per second on one or more IPU processors.
Some of these commands reference IPU devices by their ID. The ID mapping is shown in C2 PCIe Device IDs and channel map.
The use and output of each of these tools is described in the following sections.