Segment 20
This sub-session focused on comprehensive end-to-end benchmarking of the cuzk proving daemon's pipeline performance using its gRPC interface. The key finding was that the standard pipeline path (slot_size=0) dramatically outperformed the partitioned path (~47.7s/proof vs ~72s/proof) because it leverages the engine's two-stage architecture where synthesis of the next proof overlaps with GPU proving of the current proof, whereas the partitioned path blocks the synthesis task for the entire proof duration, preventing any inter-proof overlap. Throughput benchmarks varying concurrency (-j 1,2,3,5) showed GPU utilization saturates at ~57% with -j >= 2, achieving 1.3 proofs/min, with synthesis time (~38s) exceeding GPU time (~26s) leaving a ~12s GPU idle gap. Testing synthesis_lookahead=2 helped but didn't fully close the gap. The partitioned path's primary value shifted from throughput improvement to memory reduction (71 GiB vs 228 GiB peak), making it suitable for memory-constrained deployments while the standard pipeline remains optimal for throughput. The analysis concluded that further GPU utilization gains would require reducing synthesis time or running multiple synthesis tasks in parallel, which would be a significant engine architecture change.