Case Studies

Design an LLM Pre-Training Pipeline

End-to-end system design interview walkthrough. Data curation, tokenization, distributed training, fault tolerance, scaling laws, and evaluation for pre-training a large language model.

Problem Statement & Requirements

Requirements & Scale Estimation

The Basics

System Architecture & Data Flow

Deep Dive: Data Pipeline

Data Pipeline & Quality Filtering

Deep Dive: Tokenization

Tokenizer Training & Design

Deep Dive: Model Architecture

Transformer Architecture Decisions

Deep Dive: Distributed Training

4D Parallelism & GPU Clusters

Deep Dive: Fault Tolerance

Checkpointing & Failure Recovery

Deep Dive: Scaling Laws

Scaling Laws & Monitoring

Deep Dive: Evaluation

Benchmarks & Contamination

Deep Dive: Cost & Operations

Cost Optimization & Launch Strategy
SWE Quiz - Master System Design & ML Interviews