The Manual Nvidia Forgot: A Seasoned Architect’s Guide to AI Training Clusters
Building a cluster for inference is a weekend project. Building one for distributed training is a war of attrition against physics and “standard” enterprise defaults. After architecting several H100/H200 deployments, I’ve realized the bottlenecks aren’t the GPUs themselves. It’s the “infrastructure tax” we pay for choosing the wrong networking, storage, and BIOS settings. We talk…