System Checks

I got tired of jumping between Stack Overflow tabs, nvidia-smi man pages, and half-remembered PyTorch commands every time I set up a new machine or debugged a training run. So I wrote this — a single script that tells me everything I need to know about my GPU, CUDA, PyTorch, CPU, and disk performance, before I waste an hour wondering why things are slow or broken.

Usage

cd src
./run_system_checks.sh

This will run through all the checks and give you a comprehensive overview of system capabilities.

What's up with disk_speed and filesystem_speed?

Yes, they are completely different:

disk_speed.sh:

• Uses fio (Flexible I/O Tester) - a sophisticated benchmarking tool
• Tests read speed only
• 1GB test file, runs for 30 seconds
• Requires installing fio (sudo dnf install -y fio)
• Includes a reference table comparing HDD, SATA SSD, and NVMe speeds

filesystem_speed.sh:

• Uses dd command - basic Unix utility
• Tests both write and read speed
• 100MB test file, quick test
• Clears filesystem cache between tests for accuracy
• No additional tools needed (dd is built-in)
• Cleans up the test file when done

The main differences:

1. Different tools (fio vs dd)
2. Different scope (read-only vs read+write)
3. Different test sizes (1GB vs 100MB)
4. fio is more advanced/accurate but requires installation; dd is simpler and always available