How to shift process from GPU to CPU usage

Question

My nvidia-smi output is as follows

COVID19_002_6LU7_Protease_Top_3/ni_fda130/fda130_fix$ nvidia-smi
Sun Jun  7 15:00:30 2020       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 440.33.01    Driver Version: 440.33.01    CUDA Version: 10.2     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  Quadro K620         On   | 00000000:02:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 63%   73C    P0    19W /  30W |   1253MiB /  1994MiB |     98%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1406      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                            12MiB |
|    0      2006      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                           193MiB |
|    0      2186      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                         370MiB |
|    0      3007      G   ...AAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAAAAAAA= --shared-files   400MiB |
|    0      9680      G   /opt/teamviewer/tv_bin/TeamViewer             10MiB |
|    0     14270      G   /usr/lib/rstudio/bin/rstudio                  56MiB |
|    0     14961      G   /usr/lib/rstudio/bin/rstudio                  61MiB |
|    0     22725      G   ...passed-by-fd --v8-snapshot-passed-by-fd     4MiB |
|    0     23617      C   gmx                                           74MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

gmx is molecular dynamics simulation and is my primary process.

I am not aware of some processes especially ...AAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAAAAAAA= --shared-files . What is it? and how to prevent it from running in GPU.

Can I also shift /usr/bin/gnome-shell to CPU usage rather than GPU usage?

I came across one such question. But it is unanswered.

I also found one more thread on this topic. But it is essentially not fully answered.

Answer 1

Your GPU is being used for both display and compute processes; you can see which is which by looking at the “Type” column — “G” means that the process is a graphics process (using the GPU for its display), “C” means that the process is a compute process (using the GPU for computation).

To move a type “G” process of the GPU, you need to stop it from displaying on the GPU, which will involve stopping the process and (if appropriate) starting it on another GPU for display purposes.

As far as the ...AAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAAAAAAA= --shared-files process is concerned, you’ll have to look for it using ps to determine what it is.

Answer 2

As Stephen pointed out you can use the command ps followed by the PID to determine which process is using your GPU.

I was also puzzled by the odd looking process name shown in the nvidia-smi output:

$ nvidia-smi
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 390.138                Driver Version: 390.138                   |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1461      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                            54MiB |
|    0      3495      G   ...AAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAAAAAAA= --shared-files    59MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

In my case it was google chrome and that long string of AAAs is used to set the GPU preferences in Chrome.

$ ps -fp 3495
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
ovalerio  3495  3467  0 10:37 tty2     00:04:04 /opt/google/chrome/chrome --type=gpu-process --field-trial-handle=6716317491882142118,16579441558825986940,131072 --gpu-preferences=MAAAAAAAAAAgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABgAAAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAAAAAAA= --shared-files