Field-tested methodology and concrete recipes for training and operating large-scale LLM/VLM/multi-modal models end to end - choosing and benchmarking accelerators, storage and network; SLURM/Kubernetes orchestration; maximizing training throughput and fitting models in memory; diagnosing and surviving training instabilities, NaN/Inf, and hardware/job failures; checkpointing and fault tolerance; inference performance and memory; debugging multi-node/ multi-GPU hangs; and writing/running tests. Use when the user is training or fine-tuning large models, hits low TFLOPS/MFU, OOM, slow dataloading, a loss spike/divergence, a NCCL/InfiniBand or multi-node hang, node/GPU failures, checkpoint or preemption problems, storage/network bottlenecks, or needs to pick GPUs/cloud/file-systems or size inference latency/throughput. Distilled from "Machine Learning Engineering", the latest version of which can be found at https://github.com/stas00/ml-engineering
The latest SKILL.md version can be found at https://github.com/st
2026-07-09