Setup & Requirements

To use the NVML source in Joule Profiler, your system must meet specific hardware and software requirements.

Driver Requirements

Joule Profiler accesses NVML via the shared library libnvidia-ml.so (usually in /usr/lib/ or /usr/lib64/ on Linux) installed alongside the NVIDIA drivers. You do not need to install the CUDA toolkit manually, but the base GPU drivers are required.

Note

These libraries are installed automatically with standard NVIDIA Display Drivers.

Hardware Support

Energy consumption metrics are available on NVIDIA GPUs based on the Volta architecture (e.g., Tesla V100, Titan V) and newer. This includes all modern consumer architectures starting from Turing (RTX 20 series). Older architectures (Pascal, Maxwell, Kepler) may report other metrics but do not expose the energy counters required by this profiler.

Verification

Before running Joule Profiler, you can verify that your drivers are correctly installed and that your GPU supports management queries using the standard nvidia-smi tool.

Run the following command in your terminal:

nvidia-smi -q -d POWER

The output should look similar to the following:

==============NVSMI LOG==============

Timestamp                                 : Sat Feb  7 11:17:58 2026
Driver Version                            : 550.163.01
CUDA Version                              : 12.4

Attached GPUs                             : 1
GPU 00000000:01:00.0
    GPU Power Readings
        Average Power Draw                : N/A
        Instantaneous Power Draw          : 31.64 W
        Current Power Limit               : 140.00 W
        ...

Warning

If your output does not show “Power Draw” or “Energy Consumption,” your hardware may not support the necessary features for this profiler.