Technical practice
Designing Large-Scale GPU Clusters
What to coverExplain your approach to architecting a 1,000+ GPU cluster. Focus on considerations for high-performance fabrics like InfiniBand or RoCEv2, multi-rail network designs, and storage solutions like Lustre or GPFS to prevent I/O bottlenecks during distributed training.
HPC Scheduler Optimization
What to coverCompare Slurm and PBS Pro in the context of managing heterogeneous XPU clusters. Discuss how you configure these schedulers to handle job preemption, resource allocation, and fair-share policies for multi-tenant AI and HPC workloads.
Infrastructure-as-Code for HPC
What to coverDescribe how you utilize Terraform and Ansible to automate the deployment of HPC environments. Address how you manage configuration drift and ensure reproducibility across hybrid cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
CUDA and GPU Performance Tuning
What to coverDetail your methodology for troubleshooting performance issues in NVIDIA H100/A100 environments. Discuss the use of profiling tools to identify kernel bottlenecks, memory bandwidth limitations, or inefficient data movement between CPU and GPU.
Containerization in HPC
What to coverDiscuss the trade-offs between using Singularity and Kubernetes for containerizing HPC applications. Explain how you manage container images and runtime environments to ensure high performance and security in a shared cluster.
Hybrid Cloud Bursting Strategies
What to coverExplain the technical challenges of bursting on-premises HPC workloads to public cloud providers like Azure or AWS. Focus on data synchronization, latency management, and cost-optimization strategies such as using Spot instances or Reserved Instances.
AI Platform Integration
What to coverHow do you integrate MLOps tools like Kubeflow or MLflow with existing HPC infrastructure? Describe the process of enabling researchers to run distributed training jobs seamlessly while maintaining security and resource governance.
Networking for Accelerated Computing
What to coverExplain the significance of InfiniBand NDR 400Gb/s and RoCEv2 in modern supercomputing environments. Discuss how you design network topologies to minimize latency and maximize throughput for large-scale model training.
Behavioural practice
Handling Critical Infrastructure Failure
What to coverDescribe a time you had to troubleshoot a high-priority outage in a production cluster. Focus on your diagnostic process, how you communicated the impact to stakeholders, and the steps you took to restore service and prevent recurrence.
Managing Technical Debt vs. Innovation
What to coverProvide an example of how you balanced the need to maintain legacy HPC systems with the requirement to implement new AI-driven infrastructure. Explain how you prioritized tasks and managed expectations with your team or management.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
What to coverDescribe a situation where you had to explain complex infrastructure requirements to non-technical stakeholders or data scientists. How did you ensure alignment between their workload needs and the technical constraints of the platform?
Adapting to Rapid Technological Change
What to coverGive an example of how you stayed current with emerging technologies like Agentic AI or new GPU architectures. Explain how you applied this knowledge to improve an existing process or solve a specific infrastructure challenge.