AIC-200 · GPU & AI Compute · Practitioner
Linux for GPU Systems — full syllabus
What the kernel is doing underneath your training job, and how to tune it. The layer almost nobody teaches.
Duration4 full days in person · 8 half-days online
Cohortmax 14 in person · 20 online
Pricefrom SAR 10,500 in person · local pricing per city
Delivery35% principles · 20% guided investigation · 45% engineering studio
Who this course is for
Platform and infrastructure engineers responsible for the Linux layer under GPU workloads — drivers, scheduling, memory, and the performance tuning that decides whether expensive GPUs are actually used.
Prerequisites
- Solid Linux administration
- AIC-100/AIC-110 or equivalent knowledge
- Ability to read C (kernel source reading is guided)
Course outline
Day 1 — Linux kernel internals I
- Kernel architecture and subsystems
- System call mechanism from user to kernel
- Kernel module API: init/exit, symbol export
- Process scheduling: CFS vruntime, red-black tree, load balancing
- RT policies SCHED_FIFO/SCHED_RR
Day 2 — Linux kernel internals II
- CPU isolation: isolcpus, nohz_full, rcu_nocbs
- Memory management: mmap, VMA, page faults, buddy allocator, slab, vmalloc
- Memory pressure: kswapd, OOM, cgroup v2
- Device model, bus_type and sysfs
- Kernel build and configuration; debugging with printk/dynamic debug
Day 3 — Linux performance tuning
- CPU affinity: taskset, sched_setaffinity; NUMA-aware launch with numactl
- Huge pages and TLB miss analysis
- I/O schedulers (none, mq-deadline, kyber, bfq) for NVMe
- Network stack tuning: sysctl, BBR, busy polling
- Profiling with perf, ftrace, eBPF/bpftrace/BCC
- IRQ affinity, tickless config, RCU offloading, latency histograms
Day 4 — Linux for GPU workloads
- NVIDIA driver stack: nvidia.ko, nvidia-uvm.ko, nvidia-modeset.ko
- Driver installation: .run, packages, DKMS; module signing
- DRM/KMS; PCI enumeration with lspci -vvv; /dev/nvidia*
- GPU passthrough: VFIO, IOMMU, QEMU; SR-IOV for NICs
- NVIDIA Container Toolkit and runtime hooks
- Driver troubleshooting: dmesg, nvidia-bug-report.sh
Hands-on labs
- Lab: build and load a kernel module; navigate the scheduler and memory code paths it touches
- Lab: isolate CPUs with isolcpus/nohz_full/rcu_nocbs and prove jitter reduction on a latency histogram
- Lab: profile a workload with perf and an eBPF/BCC tool; produce a flame graph and act on it
- Lab: install and validate the NVIDIA driver stack; pass a GPU through to a QEMU VM with VFIO
- Lab: configure the NVIDIA Container Toolkit and verify GPU access from inside a container
Capstone project
Take a misconfigured GPU server from symptom to tuned baseline: discover the driver, scheduling, memory and IRQ problems you are given, fix them with evidence, and deliver a reproducible tuning manifest with before/after latency and throughput distributions.
What you leave with
- A repeatable kernel tuning methodology, not a bag of sysctl tricks
- Working skills with perf, ftrace, eBPF/BCC and flame graphs
- NVIDIA driver lifecycle and VFIO passthrough experience
- A tuning manifest template applicable to your own fleet
Upcoming dates
| Dates | Where | Seats | Early bird | Regular | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 Nov – 18 Nov 20264 full days | RiyadhIn person · KAFD Conference Centre | 11 of 14 | SAR 9,450until 16 Oct | ||
| 22 Nov – 25 Nov 20264 full days | Kuwait CityIn person · Al Hamra Tower | 6 of 14 | KWD 780until 23 Oct | ||
| 22 Nov – 25 Nov 20264 full days | MuscatIn person · Knowledge Oasis Muscat | 11 of 14 | OMR 970until 23 Oct | ||
| 29 Nov – 8 Dec 20268 half-days | Gulf bandLive online · 09:00–13:00 GMT+3 | 3 of 20 | US$1,800until 30 Oct | ||
| 30 Nov – 3 Dec 20264 full days | OttawaIn person · Kanata North Tech Park | 6 of 14 | CAD 3,430until 31 Oct | ||
| 7 Dec – 10 Dec 20264 full days | TorontoIn person · MaRS Discovery District | 11 of 14 | CAD 3,430until 7 Nov | ||
| 7 Dec – 10 Dec 20264 full days | LondonIn person · Shoreditch Works | 6 of 14 | GBP 1,960until 7 Nov | ||
| 7 Dec – 16 Dec 20268 half-days | Europe bandLive online · 09:00–13:00 CET | 8 of 20 | US$1,800until 7 Nov | ||
| 7 Dec – 16 Dec 20268 half-days | Americas bandLive online · 13:00–17:00 ET | 13 of 20 | US$1,800until 7 Nov | ||
| 14 Dec – 17 Dec 20264 full days | BerlinIn person · Factory Görlitzer Park | 11 of 14 | EUR 2,320until 14 Nov |
Book a seat, or bring this course to your team
Seats can be reserved online; private delivery runs on-site or live online, adapted to your stack.
Questions about fit or prerequisites? Email hello@kernelsystems.academy. To save this syllabus, print this page to PDF from your browser.