kv transfer
AI infra interview questions tagged kv transfer, across every topic.
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Concepts behind "kv transfer"
The curriculum that explains the ideas these questions test.
Foundational
Multi-Node Serving TopologiesOnce a model needs more GPUs than one NVLink domain holds, the deployment shape becomes a real design decision. Tensor parallelism stays inside the node because it communicates twice per layer per token. Across nodes the choices are data parallelism with replicas, pipeline parallelism with a bubble, expert parallelism with an all-to-all, or disaggregation that runs prefill and decode on separate pools and ships the KV cache between them. Each has a different failure mode and a different scaling story.🧮 Open Weights & Serving Engines
Advanced
Disaggregated Prefill and DecodePrefill is compute-bound and decode is memory-bound, so running both on the same GPUs means each phase interferes with the other and neither runs on the hardware it wants. Disaggregation puts them on separate pools and ships the KV cache from prefill nodes to decode nodes over the fabric. It lets TTFT and TPOT scale independently and puts high-bandwidth parts where they pay, at the price of a KV transfer per request and a control plane. It pays at scale with long prompts; it does not pay for a small fleet.🚀 Inference & Serving🔒 Premium
