Debugging

The Simple Plan (That Wasn’t Simple) After seeing the mysterious 26GB memory overhead in Docker, my plan was straightforward: Extract the container’s filesystem Run the same Python scripts natively Compare the results Done! Ha. Hahahaha. No. Attempt 1: Just Run It My first thought: “Let’s just run the Docker scripts on my system. How hard can it be?” 1 2 python /home/khan/benchmark-spark/benchmarks/trtllm_benchmark.py \ --model deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B What I got: Runtime nightmare. ...

The YouTube Problem If you search for “DGX Spark performance” on YouTube, you’ll find plenty of videos with clickbait titles like “NVIDIA’s $X Machine is a DISAPPOINTMENT” or “Grace Blackwell: Overhyped and Underdelivering.” And that really bothers me. Not because I’m an NVIDIA fanboy (I’m not), but because none of these reviewers provided a technical explanation of why performance wasn’t meeting expectations. They just pointed at benchmark numbers, said “slow,” and moved on. No investigation into kernel settings, driver versions, container configurations, or software stack optimization. Just… blame the hardware. ...