Hardware-Attributed Operator Profiling for PyTorch

RESUMO

Framework profilers expose operator timing without hardware counters; GPU profilers expose hardware counters without operator attribution. Bridging this gap manually is error-prone and does not scale. We present Operator Profiler, a hardware attribution pipeline that automatically links hardware metrics to PyTorch operators via three complementary attribution paths: this http URL CUPTI correlation, NVTX temporal enclosure with per-stream interval trees, and Inductor fusion- map enrichment from debug artifacts. NVIDIA Nsight Compute (ncu) hardware counters are matched to NVIDIA Nsight Systems (nsys) kernel records via invocation-order matching, avoiding timestamp joins across incompatible clock domains. A curated 20-counter metric set with duration-weighted aggregation covers all hardware bottleneck axes, layer deduplication reduces ncu replay time by a factor of N/K for models with N layers across K unique structural classes, and GPU clock locking controls the kernel-duration aggregates used for operator-level comparison. On an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell, Operator Profiler attributes 95-100% of kernel runtime for compiled workloads (GPT-2, SDPA Attention); black-box library backends such as cuDNN RNN are correctly surfaced as greater than 85% unattributed rather than silently dropped. Applied to profile-guided FX graph optimization, attributed profiles yield 1.76x-2.24x profiled-kernel-time speedups on the two compiled optimization case studies; a third LSTM diagnostic case identifies cuDNN re-dispatch as a structural fix rather than an FX graph rewrite.