[Feat] Drop-in Torch CUDA Profiler (#27841)

Signed-off-by: Benjamin Chislett <bchislett@nvidia.com>

docs/contributing/profiling.md

@@ -39,7 +39,7 @@ Refer to [examples/offline_inference/simple_profiling.py](../../examples/offline
 
 ```bash
 VLLM_TORCH_PROFILER_DIR=./vllm_profile \
-    vllm serve meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-70B
+    vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
 ```
 
 vllm bench command:
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@ vllm bench command:
 ```bash
 vllm bench serve \
     --backend vllm \
-    --model meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-70B \
+    --model meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct \
     --dataset-name sharegpt \
     --dataset-path sharegpt.json \
     --profile \
@@ -70,18 +70,21 @@ apt update
 apt install nsight-systems-cli
 ```
 
-### Example commands and usage
+!!! tip
+    When profiling with `nsys`, it is advisable to set the environment variable `VLLM_WORKER_MULTIPROC_METHOD=spawn`. The default is to use the `fork` method instead of `spawn`. More information on the topic can be found in the [Nsight Systems release notes](https://docs.nvidia.com/nsight-systems/ReleaseNotes/index.html#general-issues).
 
-When profiling with `nsys`, it is advisable to set the environment variable `VLLM_WORKER_MULTIPROC_METHOD=spawn`. The default is to use the `fork` method instead of `spawn`. More information on the topic can be found in the [Nsight Systems release notes](https://docs.nvidia.com/nsight-systems/ReleaseNotes/index.html#general-issues).
+The Nsight Systems profiler can be launched with `nsys profile ...`, with a few recommended flags for vLLM: `--trace-fork-before-exec=true --cuda-graph-trace=node`.
+
+### Example commands and usage
 
 #### Offline Inference
 
-For basic usage, you can just append `nsys profile -o report.nsys-rep --trace-fork-before-exec=true --cuda-graph-trace=node` before any existing script you would run for offline inference.
+For basic usage, you can just append the profiling command before any existing script you would run for offline inference.
 
 The following is an example using the `vllm bench latency` script:
 
 ```bash
-nsys profile -o report.nsys-rep \
+nsys profile  \
     --trace-fork-before-exec=true \
     --cuda-graph-trace=node \
 vllm bench latency \
@@ -95,40 +98,29 @@ vllm bench latency \
 
 #### OpenAI Server
 
-To profile the server, you will want to prepend your `vllm serve` command with `nsys profile` just like for offline inference, however you must specify `--delay XX --duration YY` parameters according to the needs of your benchmark. After the duration time has been used up, the server will be killed.
+To profile the server, you will want to prepend your `vllm serve` command with `nsys profile` just like for offline inference, but you will need to specify a few other arguments to enable dynamic capture similarly to the Torch Profiler:
 
 ```bash
 # server
-nsys profile -o report.nsys-rep \
+VLLM_TORCH_CUDA_PROFILE=1 \
+nsys profile \
     --trace-fork-before-exec=true \
     --cuda-graph-trace=node \
-    --delay 30 \
-    --duration 60 \
+    --capture-range=cudaProfilerApi \
+    --capture-range-end repeat \
     vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
 
 # client
 vllm bench serve \
     --backend vllm \
     --model meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct \
-    --num-prompts 1 \
-    --dataset-name random \
-    --random-input 1024 \
-    --random-output 512
+    --dataset-name sharegpt \
+    --dataset-path sharegpt.json \
+    --profile \
+    --num-prompts 2
 ```
 
-In practice, you should set the `--duration` argument to a large value. Whenever you want the server to stop profiling, run:
-
-```bash
-nsys sessions list
-```
-
-to get the session id in the form of `profile-XXXXX`, then run:
-
-```bash
-nsys stop --session=profile-XXXXX
-```
-
-to manually kill the profiler and generate your `nsys-rep` report.
+With `--profile`, vLLM will capture a profile for each run of `vllm bench serve`. Once the server is killed, the profiles will all be saved.
 
 #### Analysis
 

vllm/entrypoints/openai/api_server.py

@@ -1280,10 +1280,16 @@ async def invocations(raw_request: Request):
 
 
 if envs.VLLM_TORCH_PROFILER_DIR:
-    logger.warning(
+    logger.warning_once(
         "Torch Profiler is enabled in the API server. This should ONLY be "
         "used for local development!"
     )
+elif envs.VLLM_TORCH_CUDA_PROFILE:
+    logger.warning_once(
+        "CUDA Profiler is enabled in the API server. This should ONLY be "
+        "used for local development!"
+    )
+if envs.VLLM_TORCH_PROFILER_DIR or envs.VLLM_TORCH_CUDA_PROFILE:
 
     @router.post("/start_profile")
     async def start_profile(raw_request: Request):

vllm/envs.py

@@ -87,6 +87,7 @@ if TYPE_CHECKING:
     VLLM_HTTP_TIMEOUT_KEEP_ALIVE: int = 5  # seconds
     VLLM_PLUGINS: list[str] | None = None
     VLLM_LORA_RESOLVER_CACHE_DIR: str | None = None
+    VLLM_TORCH_CUDA_PROFILE: bool = False
     VLLM_TORCH_PROFILER_DIR: str | None = None
     VLLM_TORCH_PROFILER_RECORD_SHAPES: bool = False
     VLLM_TORCH_PROFILER_WITH_PROFILE_MEMORY: bool = False
@@ -815,6 +816,11 @@ environment_variables: dict[str, Callable[[], Any]] = {
     "VLLM_LORA_RESOLVER_CACHE_DIR": lambda: os.getenv(
         "VLLM_LORA_RESOLVER_CACHE_DIR", None
     ),
+    # Enables torch CUDA profiling if set.
+    # On NVIDIA GPUs, this will start/stop cudaProfilerApi when triggered.
+    "VLLM_TORCH_CUDA_PROFILE": lambda: bool(
+        os.getenv("VLLM_TORCH_CUDA_PROFILE", "0") != "0"
+    ),
     # Enables torch profiler if set.
     # Both AsyncLLM's CPU traces as well as workers'
     # traces (CPU & GPU) will be saved under this directory.

vllm/profiler/gpu_profiler.py

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+# SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
+# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: Copyright contributors to the vLLM project
+
+from vllm.logger import init_logger
+
+logger = init_logger(__name__)
+
+
+class CudaProfilerWrapper:
+    def __init__(self) -> None:
+        self._profiler_running = False
+        # Note: lazy import to avoid dependency issues if CUDA is not available.
+        import torch.cuda.profiler as cuda_profiler
+
+        self._cuda_profiler = cuda_profiler
+
+    def start(self) -> None:
+        try:
+            self._cuda_profiler.start()
+            self._profiler_running = True
+            logger.info_once("Started CUDA profiler")
+        except Exception as e:
+            logger.warning_once("Failed to start CUDA profiler: %s", e)
+
+    def stop(self) -> None:
+        if self._profiler_running:
+            try:
+                self._cuda_profiler.stop()
+                logger.info_once("Stopped CUDA profiler")
+            except Exception as e:
+                logger.warning_once("Failed to stop CUDA profiler: %s", e)
+            finally:
+                self._profiler_running = False
+
+    def shutdown(self) -> None:
+        """Ensure profiler is stopped when shutting down."""
+        self.stop()

vllm/v1/worker/gpu_worker.py

@@ -35,6 +35,7 @@ from vllm.model_executor import set_random_seed
 from vllm.model_executor.models.interfaces import is_mixture_of_experts
 from vllm.model_executor.warmup.kernel_warmup import kernel_warmup
 from vllm.platforms import current_platform
+from vllm.profiler.gpu_profiler import CudaProfilerWrapper
 from vllm.sequence import IntermediateTensors
 from vllm.tasks import SupportedTask
 from vllm.utils.mem_constants import GiB_bytes
@@ -116,6 +117,8 @@ class Worker(WorkerBase):
                     torch_profiler_trace_dir, worker_name=worker_name, use_gzip=True
                 ),
             )
+        elif envs.VLLM_TORCH_CUDA_PROFILE:
+            self.profiler = CudaProfilerWrapper()
         else:
             self.profiler = None
 
@@ -593,7 +596,10 @@ class Worker(WorkerBase):
         else:
             self.profiler.stop()
             # only print profiler results on rank 0
-            if self.local_rank == 0:
+            if (
+                isinstance(self.profiler, torch.profiler.profile)
+                and self.local_rank == 0
+            ):
                 print(
                     self.profiler.key_averages().table(sort_by="self_cuda_time_total")
                 )