Post
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My 15M French LLM is finished. Three models on Hugging Face, clean code, honest results.
I can't finish validating them, because my PC won't stay on.
The last honest step was simple: rerun the three looped models on two more seeds, so I can report variance instead of a single lucky run. 8 runs, ~50 hours overnight. Routine.
Except mid-training, the whole machine freezes solid. Screen black, RAM still lit, power button dead, I have to cut mains power at the wall. No blue screen, no crash dump. Just a dead PC that's still powered.
The event logs tell the story: repeated NVIDIA driver errors (nvlddmkm 153, 4101) building up for days, even at idle, at 1am, with nothing running, then Kernel-Power 41 with no bugcheck. A 2017 GTX 1080 Ti fighting a 2026 driver that's known to be rough on Pascal cards.
Out of 8 planned runs, the machine survived exactly two. So the results stay exactly what I called them: preliminary, one seed. A crash is not a data point.
The frustrating part isn't the bug. It's that the science is clean and the code is ready, the only thing missing is a machine that survives a night.
The plan: roll back the driver, rent cloud GPUs (Lambda Labs) to finish the seeds, and long-term, build a rig that can actually sustain solo research. If you've beaten Kernel-Power 41 on a Pascal card or want to support the work. I'm genuinely open to it.
Solo ML runs on whatever hardware you can reach. Right now mine is a 2017 card that won't stay awake.
Full write-up 👇
🔗 https://huggingface.co/blog/RDTvlokip/the-hardware-wall-kernel-power-41
I can't finish validating them, because my PC won't stay on.
The last honest step was simple: rerun the three looped models on two more seeds, so I can report variance instead of a single lucky run. 8 runs, ~50 hours overnight. Routine.
Except mid-training, the whole machine freezes solid. Screen black, RAM still lit, power button dead, I have to cut mains power at the wall. No blue screen, no crash dump. Just a dead PC that's still powered.
The event logs tell the story: repeated NVIDIA driver errors (nvlddmkm 153, 4101) building up for days, even at idle, at 1am, with nothing running, then Kernel-Power 41 with no bugcheck. A 2017 GTX 1080 Ti fighting a 2026 driver that's known to be rough on Pascal cards.
Out of 8 planned runs, the machine survived exactly two. So the results stay exactly what I called them: preliminary, one seed. A crash is not a data point.
The frustrating part isn't the bug. It's that the science is clean and the code is ready, the only thing missing is a machine that survives a night.
The plan: roll back the driver, rent cloud GPUs (Lambda Labs) to finish the seeds, and long-term, build a rig that can actually sustain solo research. If you've beaten Kernel-Power 41 on a Pascal card or want to support the work. I'm genuinely open to it.
Solo ML runs on whatever hardware you can reach. Right now mine is a 2017 card that won't stay awake.
Full write-up 👇
🔗 https://huggingface.co/blog/RDTvlokip/the-hardware-wall-kernel-power-41