Files
esh-pfi-infrastructure/docs
vh 100670eed1 power: what DCGM is, and why not to plan around it on workstation-SKU cards
DCGM is NVIDIA's own Data Center GPU Manager -- first-party, Apache-2.0, packaged as
datacenter-gpu-manager -- and it layers above NVML rather than beside it: nvidia-smi is a
thin CLI over NVML's per-GPU primitives, and DCGM is a daemon plus dcgmi adding health,
diagnostics, config enforcement, policy and group abstractions on top. Which is why its
group notion still resolves to N per-GPU writes underneath.

The caveat that matters, and it undercuts the experiment suggested in the previous
commit: DCGM is datacenter-oriented and parts of it are gated to datacenter SKUs of the
Tesla/A100/H100 class. Our cards are professional/workstation parts -- RTX PRO 6000
Blackwell Max-Q and RTX 6000 Ada -- and several DCGM capabilities are unsupported or
degraded outside that line, plausibly including config enforcement, which is precisely
the power path. So DCGM_CONFIG_POWER_BUDGET_GROUP may return 'unsupported on this
device'. Downgraded from 'worth testing' to five minutes of curiosity after the real
work, and explicitly not a planning assumption.

None of which touches the plan: nvidia-smi -pl 250 is plain NVML and works on these
cards. DCGM would only have bought the group-budget experiment and nicer telemetry, and
is probably not installed anyway since beszel-agent-nvidia shells out to nvidia-smi.
2026-09-13 00:32:40 -07:00
..

docs/

Navigation map for the documentation tree. New session? Read orientation.md first — it's the narrative overview of the fleet, backup architecture, governing principles, and gotchas, and it points at everything else.

Tree

docs/
├── orientation.md            # start here — fleet overview + where-to-look guide
├── runbooks/                 # ops runbooks (recovery, deployment phases)
│   ├── disaster-recovery.md
│   ├── nh3-prune-ritual.md
│   └── pbs-deployment.md
└── pfi/                      # PFI-specific reference (services, models, VMs)
    ├── docker-stack.md
    ├── model-list.md
    ├── proxmox-vms.md
    ├── recommended-model-settings.md
    ├── vm-102-matrix-appservice.md
    └── vm-102-matrix-synapse.md

What goes where

  • runbooks/ — step-by-step ops procedures. Anything you'd reach for during an incident or while standing up new infrastructure. Examples: disaster recovery (blast-radius tiers + restoration steps), PBS deployment (9-phase rollout). New runbook → new file here.
  • pfi/ — PFI-specific reference material that's too narrow for the top-level CLAUDE.md but doesn't change incident response. AI model inventory, recommended inference settings, Matrix bridge config, Proxmox VM map. New stable reference → new file here.
  • Top-level (docs/orientation.md, docs/README.md) — narrative guides about the workspace itself, not about specific infra.

Cross-references

  • Fleet topology + servers table: top-level CLAUDE.md.
  • Open work + recent milestones: top-level STATUS.md.
  • Durable cross-session facts: ~/.claude/projects/-home-lkraven-development-eshpfi-management/memory/.

Conventions

  • Markdown, GitHub-flavored. CommonMark renders fine in most viewers.
  • File names are lowercase-kebab-case, descriptive. No dates in filenames — git history covers that.
  • One topic per file. If a file grows past ~500 lines, look for a natural split before adding more.
  • No checked-in binaries or checksums. Build/release artifacts belong in a build pipeline or tools/, not docs/.