🔬 Hardware Architecture & Key Technical Learnings

This document details the practical hardware behaviors, quirks, and engineering solutions discovered while building and optimizing this 3-GPU Turing inference rig on an HPE ProLiant DL380p Gen8 server.

1. NVIDIA CMP 50HX Mining GPUs: VBIOS & Power States

Why CMP 50HX Mining Cards Idle at ~75W–85W Stock (The 100% Video Engine Pinning Bug)

No Display / Headless Architecture: CMP 50HX mining cards lack physical display outputs and raster display engines.
The 100% Video Engine Pinning Bug: The .17 (and newer .1A) CMP mining VBIOSes have a firmware bug where the GPU's hardware Video Engine (NVDEC) registers as 100% utilized at all times. This prevents the GPU power controller from automatically dropping into its lowest P8 sleep state, trapping stock idle power at roughly 75W–85W per card.
The Fix:
- On Windows: Use NVIDIA Inspector's Multi-Display Power Saver. Add AI backends (e.g., ollama_server.exe or python.exe) to the high-performance threshold list to force the cards into true ~5W–8W idle states when inactive.
- On Linux: Use our custom dynamic power governor (power-governor.py) with nvidia-smi script wrappers to manually clamp idle clocks to 300 MHz (-lgc 300,300) and apply a 150W power limit (-pl 150).

OEM Reference VBIOS vs. MSI VBIOS (`90.02.60.00.17`)

Comparing the hardware profiles and the cross-flashing outcome:

GPU 2 (Original MSI Board 0x1462, VBIOS 90.02.60.00.17):
- Idles at ~31.8W – 33.7W when core is locked to 300 MHz.
- Minimum fan speed floor: 25%.
- Aggressive P3 voltage gating tables.
GPU 1 (Original NVIDIA Reference OEM 0x10DE, VBIOS 90.02.60.00.01):
- Idled at ~61.2W – 61.8W stock (locked 40% fan curve floor, higher static VRM leakage).
Cross-Flashing Result:
- Cross-flashed GPU 1 with the MSI VBIOS ROM (vbios/msi_cmp50hx_90.02.60.00.17.rom) using nvflash -6.
- Verified Outcome: GPU 1 idle power immediately dropped from 61.8W down to 31.89W (a ~30W direct reduction!), and fan curve synchronized to 25% minimum floor across both cards.

2. Power Cap vs Inference Throughput

100W Power Cap (-pl 100): Capping CMP 50HX cards to 100W throttles GPU 1's core clock down to 1,305 MHz during tensor-parallel splits, dropping generation speed from 18.0 tok/s \rightarrow ~14.0 tok/s.
150W Power Cap (-pl 150): Provides sufficient headroom for full 1,800–1,900 MHz boost clocks, sustaining 18.03 tok/s while protecting against unnecessary 225W power spikes and heat.

3. Automated Dynamic Power Governor (`power-governor.py`)

The Problem with GPU Utilization Polling: On Turing GPUs during batch=1 token generation, utilization.gpu fluctuates between 0% and 5% between token steps. Relying on GPU utilization causes false idle triggers.
The Solution: Direct slot polling against llama-server (http://127.0.0.1:8080/slots is_processing: True).
Governor Behavior:
- When is_processing: True: Instantly sets unconstrained clocks (nvidia-smi -rgc) \rightarrow 18.03 tok/s.
- When idle for > 15 seconds: Sets low-power 300–600 MHz core clocks \rightarrow drops power to ~31W/card.

4. HPE ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Platform Learnings

Sandy Bridge-EP (v1) vs. Ivy Bridge-EP (v2) PCIe 3.0 Jitter

The Sandy Bridge-EP v1 Bug: Intel's first-generation PCIe 3.0 controller on Xeon E5-2600 v1 (2012) suffered from transmitter signal margin attenuation (Intel Errata BD78/BD105). Over riser cables, the 8.0 GHz eye diagram degrades, forcing links down to Gen 1 (2.5 GT/s).
The Ivy Bridge-EP v2 Fix: Xeon E5-2600 v2 (22nm Tri-Gate) completely redesigned the PCIe 3.0 PHY with CTLE equalization, reliably locking Gen 3 speeds across risers.

NUMA Socket Pinning

Dual-socket Xeon servers have two distinct NUMA nodes.
If all GPUs are plugged into Primary Riser 1, they are physically connected to CPU Socket 1 (NUMA Node 1).
Binding llama-server to NUMA Node 1 (CPUAffinity & NUMAPolicy=bind) eliminates all host-to-device memory traffic over the cross-socket Intel QPI bus.

External PSU & Common Grounding

When GPUs receive PCIe data signals from the server motherboard but 12V power from an external PSU:
Ensure the server chassis and external PSU casing share a solid common ground to eliminate high-frequency ground loop noise on PCIe differential clock lines (REFCLK).

6. Low-Latency NCCL Ring Buffer Tuning (2x Prefill Speedup)

The Problem: Default NCCL ring allocations (4MB–8MB) introduce high PCIe bus synchronization latency on multi-GPU AllReduce barriers on Turing architecture (sm_75).

The Solution:

export CUDA_DEVICE_MAX_CONNECTIONS=1
export NCCL_BUFFSIZE=2097152       # 2MB ring buffer (aligned to Turing L2 cache lines)
export NCCL_NET_GDR_LEVEL=0         # Pure local PCIe bus routing
export NCCL_P2P_DISABLE=0          # Direct P2P transfers
export NCCL_ALGO=RING              # Direct 1-stage ring AllReduce
export NCCL_PROTO=SIMPLE           # Eliminates LL128 packet framing overhead over PCIe

Measured Benchmark:
- Baseline Prefill Speed: 72.0 tok/s
- Tuned NCCL Prefill Speed: 140.3 – 179.4 tok/s (+149% prompt processing throughput!)

7. Speculative Decoding & Multimodal (`mmproj`) Interaction

The Conflict: In llama.cpp, loading a secondary GGUF draft model (-md) simultaneously with a multimodal vision projector (--mmproj) causes an internal context initialization conflict inside libmtmd.so.
The Resolution:
- Multimodal Mode: Use N-gram context-lookup speculation (--spec-type ngram-simple --spec-ngram-simple-size-n 24 --spec-ngram-simple-size-m 4), which runs entirely in primary context with 0 additional VRAM and full vision support.
- Pure Text Mode: Remove --mmproj to enable secondary neural draft models (-md /opt/models/gguf/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf).

8. 20GB VRAM Modding Feasibility (CMP 50HX TU102)

Architecture: CMP 50HX uses the TU102 PCB layout (320-bit bus, 10 memory pads).
Memory Swap:
- Desolder 10x 1GB (8Gbit) GDDR6 BGA-180 chips (e.g., Samsung K4Z80325BC-HC14).
- Solder 10x 2GB (16Gbit) GDDR6 BGA-180 chips (e.g., Samsung K4ZAF325BM-HC14 or Micron D9ZCL).
- Modify memory strapping resistor dividers to signal 16Gbit density to the TU102 memory controller.
Payoff:
- 2x Modded Cards = 40 GB Total VRAM (capable of running full 70B/72B models like Llama-3.3-70B or Qwen2.5-72B on just 2 dedicated x16 slots).
- 4x Modded Cards = 80 GB Total VRAM (enterprise A100-tier capacity for under $1,000).

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