explaingit

fal-ai-community/smoltop

Analysis updated 2026-07-26

4PythonAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 2/5Setup · moderate

TLDR

A terminal dashboard for monitoring NVIDIA GPUs, showing live stats like memory, temperature, and power draw. Useful for tracking machine learning jobs and managing processes running on graphics cards.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Live GPU metrics
      Process table
      Warning badges
    Use cases
      ML job monitoring
      Shared server stats
      Process control
    Audience
      ML engineers
      Server admins
      Researchers
    Tech stack
      Python
      Terminal UI
    Setup
      Linux only
      NVIDIA driver
      Demo mode

Code map

Detail Auto

An interactive map of this repo's files and how they connect — its source is parsed live in your browser. Click Visualize to build it.

filefunction / class

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Monitor multiple NVIDIA GPUs on a server running machine learning jobs.

USE CASE 2

Identify and stop runaway processes consuming GPU memory.

USE CASE 3

Track GPU resource usage by user on shared computing machines.

USE CASE 4

Preview the dashboard without GPU hardware using demo mode.

What is it built with?

PythonNVIDIA Driveruvpipx

How does it compare?

fal-ai-community/smoltop1038lab/agnes-ai3eyedtiger/video2vrcemote
Stars444
LanguagePythonPythonPython
Setup difficultymoderateeasyeasy
Complexity2/52/51/5
Audienceops devopsvibe codervibe coder

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 5min

Requires a Linux machine with the NVIDIA driver loaded and Python 3.10+, install directly from GitHub since it is not on PyPI yet.

In plain English

smoltop is a terminal dashboard for monitoring NVIDIA GPUs. If you have a machine with one or more NVIDIA graphics cards, say a server running machine learning jobs, smoltop shows you a live, updating view of what those cards are doing inside your terminal window. For each GPU, smoltop displays a range of live metrics: how hard the processor is working, memory usage, power draw, temperature, fan speed, and data transfer rates. It shows small history graphs for utilization and memory so you can see trends over time. If a card starts to slow down due to heat or power limits, a red warning badge appears immediately. The process table lists every program using a GPU. If a single job spans multiple cards, it appears as one row with the total memory combined. The table also shows the user, CPU usage, process age, and whether the process is running inside a Docker or Kubernetes container. A status line at the bottom tallies memory usage by user, so you can see who is consuming the most resources. The dashboard adjusts its layout automatically based on your terminal size, packing more detail into larger windows and condensing into fewer lines when space is tight. You can cycle through display densities manually by pressing a key. It includes matching dark and light themes, and can detect your terminal's background color by default, or you can pick a theme explicitly. You can control processes directly from the table. Pressing a key sends a termination signal to stop a job, with a confirmation popup showing exactly what will be stopped. Another key suspends and resumes a process instantly, which is useful for pausing work without canceling it. You can also filter the process list, sort by various columns, and open a detail view for any process to see its full command line and per-GPU memory breakdown. The tool runs on Linux with the NVIDIA driver loaded and requires Python 3.10 or newer. It is not yet on PyPI, so you install it directly from GitHub using a tool called uv, pipx, or pip. A demo mode simulates an eight-GPU system, which is handy if you want to try it without any actual hardware present.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Install smoltop from GitHub using pipx and launch it in demo mode to see an simulated eight-GPU dashboard.
Prompt 2
Write a script that runs smoltop, waits 60 seconds, and logs the bottom status line showing memory usage by user to a text file.
Prompt 3
Explain how to use smoltop to suspend a specific machine learning process temporarily and then resume it later.
Prompt 4
Configure smoltop to use a dark theme explicitly instead of auto-detecting the terminal background color.

Frequently asked questions

What is smoltop?

A terminal dashboard for monitoring NVIDIA GPUs, showing live stats like memory, temperature, and power draw. Useful for tracking machine learning jobs and managing processes running on graphics cards.

What language is smoltop written in?

Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, NVIDIA Driver, uv.

How hard is smoltop to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.

Who is smoltop for?

Mainly ops devops.

Open on GitHub → Explain another repo

This repo across BitVibe Labs

Verify against the repo before relying on details.