2. Overview

The PopVision® Graph Analyser application is used to analyse the programs built for and executed on Graphcore’s IPU systems. It can be used for analysing and optimising the memory use and performance of programs.

The PopVision® Graph Analyser generates the following reports:

  • Summary Report of the IPU hardware, graph parameters and host configuration.

  • Insights Report , which gives you a quick overview of the memory usage of your model on the IPU, showing the tiles, vertices and exchanges that use the most memory. Graphical insights and guides for improving memory usage are also displayed, helping you to optimise memory usage for your model.

  • Memory Report, which gives a detailed analysis of memory usage across all the tiles in your IPU system, showing graphs of total memory and liveness data, and details of variable types, placement and size.

  • Liveness Report, which gives a detailed breakdown of the state of the variables at each step in your program.

  • Operations Summary, which shows a summary of all the operations for a software layer in your model, displaying statistics about code size, execution cycles, debug data and FLOPs measurements.

  • Execution Trace, which shows how many cycles each step of your instrumented program consumes.

Each of these reports is described in further detail in the sections below.

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2.1. End User License Agreement

Before you can use the Graph Analyser, you must first agree to the End User License Agreement (EULA) that is displayed when the app is first opened (assuming that you have not already agreed to it in a previous version). Clicking on the Disagree button will quit the application immediately.

You can re-read the EULA at any time after you’ve agreed to it. Select View EULA from the Help menu.

  • You can toggle the EULA dialog between modal and full-screen view by clicking on the icon to the left of the window’s title.

2.3. About the IPU

An in-depth description of the IPU hardware is available in the online IPU Programmer’s Guide. While we describe some of the relevant features of the IPU in this document, you should refer to the Poplar User Guide for a more in-depth understanding.