SigmaTrace: Library-Agnostic Observability for CPU/GPU-Initiated RDMA Communication

Javid Baydamirli; Didem Unat

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arXiv · 2610.24328

SigmaTrace: Library-Agnostic Observability for CPU/GPU-Initiated RDMA Communication

Javid Baydamirli·Didem Unat

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Abstract

RDMA networking enables low-latency, high-bandwidth communication on large systems. Despite its adoption, however, observability is lacking. Existing tools target specific communication libraries or only report aggregated data, missing per-operation behavior. The gap is widest for GPU-initiated networking, whose in-kernel RDMA operations are invisible to the host. We present SigmaTrace, a library-agnostic RDMA profiling framework providing fine-grained, per-operation visibility for CPU and GPU-initiated networking. It traces operations at the libibverbs/mlx5dv layers, the common denominator beneath communication libraries on InfiniBand and RoCE, and employs a low-overhead memory interposition technique that, to our knowledge, gives the first observability into GPU-initiated RDMA without source patching or binary instrumentation. Host-side tracing adds 1.3% overhead on NCCL AllReduce at 128 GPUs and under 2% on RCCL at 1024 GPUs. On a persistent-kernel BFS and Mixture-of-Experts inference, SigmaTrace exposes an in-kernel barrier spread and 2.13x inter-node traffic skew invisible to existing profilers.

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BibTeX RIS

Javid Baydamirli, Didem Unat. 2026-10-16. SigmaTrace: Library-Agnostic Observability for CPU/GPU-Initiated RDMA Communication. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24328

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