cuThermo

cuThermo is a Visual Studio Code extension that profiles CUDA applications and visualizes GPU memory-access heatmaps. It integrates with your CUDA toolchain and the bundled cuThermostat.so profiler to make GPU performance analysis easier, more intuitive, and fully interactive inside VS Code.

🚀 Features

• Run GPU profiling directly in VS Code
  Invoke cuThermo: Run on Current Target to execute the selected CUDA binary and collect memory-access traces.

• Automatic heatmap visualization
  Profiling results are parsed and displayed in a custom WebView panel, showing a live heatmap of memory sector activity.

• Duplicate-row collapsing
  The heatmap applies intelligent preprocessing (same logic as your web-based heatmap tool) to compress repetitive frequency rows for a more readable visualization.

• Environment validation
  Includes a command to check CUDA toolkit, nvcc, GPU availability, and whether cuThermostat.so is correctly placed.

• Configurable executable selection
  Users can specify any CUDA executable, not just a.out.

📦 Requirements

To use cuThermo effectively:

• CUDA Toolkit (nvcc available in PATH)
• NVIDIA GPU + drivers
• cuThermostat.so
  • Either bundled or installed into the workspace
  • The extension includes a command to copy/verify the shared library

Optional but recommended:

• VS Code C++ extension
• NVIDIA Nsight Systems (for advanced users)

⚙️ Extension Settings

This extension contributes the following settings:

cuthermo.execPath

Path to the target executable (e.g. ./mykernel, build/add, etc.).

cuthermo.thermostatPath

Path to cuThermostat.so if you want to override the default bundled version.

cuthermo.autoOpenHeatmap

Whether to automatically open the heatmap window after each profiling run.

🧩 Commands

🧪 Known Issues

• Heatmap panel may not resize correctly on very small displays.
• Some unusual workspace structures may cause path resolution inconsistencies.
• Requires CUDA-compatible NVIDIA hardware — no support for AMD/ROCm yet.

Please report issues on the GitHub repo.

📝 Release Notes

0.1.0

• Initial public release
• Heatmap visualization
• Profile-run integration
• Environment checking
• Executable path configuration

🔗 More Information

• Documentation for developing VS Code extensions:
  https://code.visualstudio.com/api

• cuThermo GitHub repository (if public):
  (add link here)

Enjoy profiling with cuThermo!