Neutrino: Fine-grained GPU Kernel Profiling via Programmable Probing

As GPUs play an increasingly important role in computer systems in the scaling laws era, understanding fine-grained GPU runtime behavior is more crucial than ever. However, existing GPU kernel profilers, typically kernel-exclusive or hardware-dependent, often fail to capture fine-grained measurements. This paper presents NEUTRINO, a programmable interface for GPU kernel profiling that leverages assembly-layer probing to achieve instruction-level fine granularity, profiling versatility across time and value domains, and hardware independence. To better visualize the rich details captured by NEUTRINO, we introduce the Densified Memory Access Timeline (DMAT), a novel representation that offers new insights into GPU runtime behavior. We implement NEUTRINO in Linux for both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and conduct extensive evaluations and analyses. The results demonstrate NEUTRINO’s superior capabilities in GPU kernel profiling with low overhead. We envision NEUTRINO as a valuable tool for the community and have open-sourced it to facilitate future research at https://github.com/open-neutrino/neutrino.