How can I flush GPU memory using CUDA (physical reset is unavailable)

Question

My CUDA program crashed during execution, before memory was flushed. As a result, device memory remained occupied.

I'm running on a GTX 580, for which nvidia-smi --gpu-reset is not supported.

Placing cudaDeviceReset() in the beginning of the program is only affecting the current context created by the process and doesn't flush the memory allocated before it.

I'm accessing a Fedora server with that GPU remotely, so physical reset is quite complicated.

So, the question is - Is there any way to flush the device memory in this situation?

Answer 1

check what is using your GPU memory with

sudo fuser -v /dev/nvidia*

Your output will look something like this:

                     USER        PID  ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/nvidia0:        root       1256  F...m  Xorg
                     username   2057  F...m  compiz
                     username   2759  F...m  chrome
                     username   2777  F...m  chrome
                     username   20450 F...m  python
                     username   20699 F...m  python

Then kill the PID that you no longer need on htop or with

sudo kill -9 PID.

In the example above, Pycharm was eating a lot of memory so I killed 20450 and 20699.