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Course Schedule

Being less concrete further out, the course scheduling is tentative and subject to changes.

Introduction, AI systems foundation

Week 1

08/24

Fill out background survey by 08/25

08/26

Lec1: Course introduction: Video

Reading: The Bitter Lesson; Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems; Software 2.0

08/28

Inference Speedrun out

Week 2

08/31: Lec2: Numeric data types
09/02: Lec3: Model quantization and compression

Week 3

09/07: Lec4: Project introduction
09/09: Lec5: Hardware acceleration

AI infrastructure

Week 4

09/14: Lec6: AI compute infrastructure; Project team signup due (09/14)
09/16: Lec7: AI network communication; Inference Speedrun artifact due (09/16)

Week 5

09/21: Lec8: AI storage infrastructure I
09/23: Lec9: AI storage infrastructure II

Model training paradigm and performance engineering

Week 6

09/28: Lec10: Distributed training
09/30: Lec11: FlashAttention; Project proposal due (09/30)

LLM inference

Week 7

10/05: Reading day (no class)
10/07: Lec12: LLM inference I (vLLM, KVC, speculative decoding); Paper presentation signup due (10/07)

Week 8

10/12: Lec13: LLM inference II (vLLM, KVC, speculative decoding)
10/14: Lec14: AI agents

Student paper presentations, guest lectures

Week 9

10/19: TBD
10/21: TBD

Week 10

10/26: TBD
10/28: Project checkpoint presentation

Week 11

11/02: TBD
11/04: TBD

Week 12

11/09: TBD
11/11: TBD

Week 13

11/16: TBD
11/18: TBD; Inference Speedrun report due

Week 14

11/23: TBD
11/25: Thanksgiving recess (no class)

Week 15

11/30: Project presentation I
12/02: Project presentation II

Week 16

12/07: Project presentation III
12/09: Project everything due