AI inference glossary
Benchmark metrics

Roofline

Also known as frontier envelope, roofline curve

In plain English

On InferenceX a roofline is the outer envelope drawn through the best points of one hardware configuration, showing the edge of what it achieved.

Technical definition

A roofline on InferenceX is the Pareto envelope curve drawn per hardware configuration through its non-dominated points for the selected pair of axes.

Engineering details

Which corner counts as best depends on the metrics: throughput against interactivity takes the upper right, while a cost axis is better when lower, so the envelope is anchored at whichever corner the selected metric pair defines. Points with a degenerate x value are excluded from eligibility, though they still render in the show-all view.

Why it matters

Reading a cloud of raw points invites cherry-picking, since a badly tuned configuration contributes points that no operator would ever choose. The envelope shows the achievable boundary per system, which is the shape a capacity decision is actually made against.

How to read it in InferenceX

This is not the classic roofline model from HPC, which plots attainable FLOPS against arithmetic intensity to expose a compute or memory bound. The dashboard borrows only the picture of an upper bound. Roofline direction is configured per metric, so the same points can produce a different envelope on a different axis.