AI System Design - scalability
#01 Performance

Build a Continuous Batching Server for High-Throughput LLM Inference Premium

Design a continuous batching server that dynamically admits and evicts sequences mid-generation, sustaining 8,000+ tokens per second across 128 concurrent requests on 4xA100 GPUs while keeping p99 time-to-first-token under 200ms.

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#02 Performance

Build a Disaggregated Prefill-Decode Inference Architecture Premium

Design a disaggregated prefill-decode inference architecture that separates compute-bound prefill from memory-bound decode across dedicated GPU pools, sustaining 12,000 decode tokens per second at sub-150ms TTFT while cutting GPU-hours 35% versus co-located serving.

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#03 Caching

Build a KV-Cache Sharing Layer for Multi-Turn LLM Conversations Premium

Design a distributed KV-cache sharing layer that eliminates redundant prefill computation for 50,000 concurrent multi-turn conversations, cutting time-to-first-token from 800ms to under 80ms with 70% GPU memory savings on prefix reuse.

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#04 Performance

Build a Model Sharding System for Serving 70B+ Parameter Models Premium

Design a model sharding system that splits a 70B-parameter model's 140GB of FP16 weights across 8 A100 GPUs using tensor and pipeline parallelism, sustaining 40 tokens/s per replica with under 20GB of KV cache headroom per shard.

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#05 Performance

Build a Multi-Modal Inference Server for Text, Image, and Audio Premium

A blueprint for a multi-modal inference server that fuses text, image, and audio inputs into one decoder across 250 requests per second, encoding up to 576 visual tokens and 500 audio tokens per call while holding p99 time-to-first-token under 900ms.

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#06 Databases

Build a Multi-Tenant Vector Database with Namespace Isolation Premium

Design a shared vector database serving 40,000 tenants and 2.4 billion embeddings at 25ms p99, where the smallest namespace holds 300 vectors, the largest holds 180 million, and no tenant can read another's data or steal its latency budget.

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#07 Performance

Build a Prompt Compression Pipeline to Reduce Token Costs Premium

A blueprint for compressing 8,000-token RAG contexts down to 2,000 tokens across 20,000 requests per minute, cutting billed input tokens by roughly 60% while keeping downstream answer accuracy within 2 points of the uncompressed baseline.

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#08 Performance

Build a Speculative Decoding Engine to Cut LLM Latency by 3x Premium

Design a speculative decoding engine that uses a small draft model to propose token sequences, enabling a 70B target model to verify multiple tokens per forward pass and achieve 3x throughput at p99 TTFT under 150ms.

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#09 Performance

Build a Token Budget Management System for LLM APIs Premium

Design a token budget management system that enforces per-tenant quotas at 10,000 requests per second, tracks real-time input and output token consumption, and rejects over-budget requests before inference to eliminate GPU waste and runaway API cost.

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#10 Databases

Build a Vector Index with HNSW and Quantization at 1B Vectors Premium

Design a billion-vector similarity index that serves 20,000 queries per second at 18ms p99 with recall@10 of 0.94, compressing 1.5TB of 768-dimensional embeddings into 352 bytes per vector across 64 shards.

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