Topic cluster

On-prem AI architecture: RAG, GPU sizing, benchmarks

4 notes · last update July 23, 2026
Quick answer

The technical layer of an on-prem AI deployment: how to build a RAG that doesn't hallucinate, how to size GPUs for the model and load, and how to measure retrieval quality and inference throughput. Specifics, benchmarks, and reference architectures instead of marketing diagrams.

This cluster is the engineering side of on-prem AI. We break the RAG pipeline into the parts that actually decide quality: chunking, embeddings, retrieval, and reranking, with a clear answer on when a reranker (cross-encoder) improves relevance and when it just eats GPU budget. We publish GPU sizing in numbers (e.g. Llama 70B: throughput, VRAM, quantization, vLLM/TensorRT-LLM) and reference architectures mapped to security requirements. It's material for CIOs and architects who must make hardware and design decisions but can't find neutral benchmarks in Polish, because they're almost exclusively in English. We link every technical article to its regulatory consequence (logging, isolation, oversight) and to the TCO calculator, so an architectural decision has a price tag.

// notes in this topic

How many GPUs does it really take to run Llama 3.1 70B in-house? Concrete configs (A100, H100, H200), the impact of quantization (FP16 → FP8 → INT4), tokens/s, TTFT, and cost per 1M tokens. No marketing — numbers from vLLM and TensorRT-LLM benchmarks.

Frequently asked questions
Does a reranker always improve RAG?

No, it helps with large, noisy corpora; with small, well-chunked sets it can be an unnecessary GPU cost and latency.

vLLM or Ollama for production?

For development Ollama is convenient; in production under load vLLM delivers many times the throughput (batching, multi-GPU).

How much VRAM do I need?

It depends on model size and quantization, see the GPU sizing article; roughly, an FP16 model needs ~2× its parameter count in GB, plus headroom for context.

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