poppy the training box, part 1: the beginnings

For a while I've been planning to put together a separate machine for local LLM training. Until now, I've been using my desktop PC, perry . I have an RTX 3090 installed, and can get useful training runs done (most recently, a 163M-parameter GPT-2 small style LLM in JAX ), but there are a couple of problems. perry is my daily driver. If he's doing a training run, then everything is just a little…