Plan a 7B pretrain from scratch on 64 H100s in 30 days, end to end.
64 H100s for 30 days is a real budget with a real token count. The answer sizes the run from Chinchilla, picks parallelism for this exact cluster, and has a concrete plan for loss spikes and silent data corruption.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
64 H100s for 30 days is a real budget with a real token count. The answer sizes the run from Chinchilla, picks parallelism for this exact cluster, and has a concrete plan for loss spikes and silent data corruption.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
