quarantine

A pre-flight suite is a list of tests with a number on each: DCGM health, a GEMM near the fleet median, NCCL at rated bandwidth, NICs at line rate, links active, storage reachable. What goes in the two-minute gate, what waits for the long diagnostic, and why the gate pays for itself.

You cannot remove one rank from a synchronous job; you replace the node and restart from checkpoint, and the whole craft is making that take three minutes instead of thirty. The detection signals, the drain-restart-quarantine sequence, the spare-pool arithmetic, and where elastic training changes the answer.

The controller's real design problem is not detecting faults but deciding when a signal is strong enough to remove a node from a job. The six states and their transitions, the cost asymmetry that sets every threshold, and the arithmetic showing what a one-percent false-positive rate costs at fleet scale.