1. About this Guide

Configuration and benchmarking are very tightly coupled activities. Benchmarking provides the ability to determine the potential performance based on the current system configuration, and the impact of configuration changes. Configuration changes are sometimes required to achieve optimal benchmark results, which will potentially translate into increased performance of production workloads.

This guide provides information and examples of the various system configuration attributes, both hardware and software, and how they factor into the delivered performance of GPUDirect Storage. Local drive configurations (Direct Attached Storage - DAS) and Network storage (Network Attached Storage - NAS) are covered. The benchmarking tool included when GDS is installed, gdsio, is covered and its use demonstrated.

Appendix A covers benchmarking and performance in general, along with considerations when benchmarking storage systems.