NCA-AIIO NVIDIA-Certified Associate AI Infrastructure and Operations Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

DGX OS, the operating system powering NVIDIA DGX systems, is built on Ubuntu Linux, specifically the Long-Term Support (LTS) version. It integrates Ubuntu’s robust base with NVIDIA-specific enhancements, including GPU drivers, tools, and optimizations tailored for AI and high-performance computing workloads. Neither Red Hat nor CentOS serves as the foundation for DGX OS, making Ubuntu the correct choice.

(Reference: NVIDIA DGX OS Documentation, System Requirements Section)

Kubernetes excels in container orchestration with advanced scheduling (assigning workloads based on resource needs and availability) and load balancing (distributing traffic across pods via Services). It’s not inherently bare-metal (it runs on various platforms), and inferencing capability depends on applications, not Kubernetes itself, making B and D the true statements.

(Reference: NVIDIA AI Infrastructure and Operations Study Guide, Section on Kubernetes Orchestration)

Containers (e.g., Docker) encapsulate AI applications with their dependencies, ensuring consistent execution across diverse environments—from development laptops to production clusters—without manual reconfiguration. They don’t inherently improve model accuracy, generate datasets, or boost GPU speed, focusing instead on portability and reproducibility.(Note: The document incorrectly lists A; B is correct per NVIDIA standards.)

(Reference: NVIDIA AI Infrastructure and Operations Study Guide, Section on Containers in AI Development)

GPU utilization is defined as the percentage of time the GPU’s compute engines are actively processing data, reflecting its workload intensity over a period (e.g., via nvidia-smi). It’s distinct from memory usage (a separate metric), core counts, or maximum runtime, providing a direct measure of compute activity.

(Reference: NVIDIA AI Infrastructure and Operations Study Guide, Section on GPU Monitoring)

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) measures data center efficiency, with an ideal value of 1.0 (all power used by IT equipment). A PUE of 1.2, indicating only 20% overhead, is highly efficient and closer to the ideal than 2.0 (100% overhead), 3.5, or 5.0, making it the best among the options for energy-conscious AI deployments.

(Reference: NVIDIA AI Infrastructure and Operations Study Guide, Section on Data Center Efficiency)

NVIDIA Base Command Manager is an enterprise-grade platform for monitoring, orchestrating, and managing AI infrastructure at scale, including DGX clusters and cloud resources. It offers unified visibility and workflow automation. DCGM focuses on GPU monitoring, DGX Manager is system-specific, and NeMo System Manager is fictional, making Base Command Manager the enterprise solution.

(Reference: NVIDIA Base Command Manager Documentation, Overview Section)

NVIDIA vGPU (Virtual GPU) software enables GPU virtualization by partitioning a physical GPU into multiple virtual instances, assignable to virtual machines or containers for accelerated workloads. Horizon is a VMware product, and “virtGPU” isn’t an NVIDIA offering, confirming vGPU as the correct solution.

(Reference: NVIDIA vGPU Documentation, Overview Section)

Training neural networks typically involves streaming large datasets from storage in a sequential read pattern. This ordered access maximizes throughput and minimizes seek overhead, as training pipelines ingest data in batches for processing across epochs. Writes (e.g., model checkpoints) are less frequent and typically sequential, while random writes are rare, making sequential reads the dominant pattern.(Note: The document incorrectly lists C as the answer; B aligns with NVIDIA’s documentation.)

(Reference: NVIDIA AI Infrastructure and Operations Study Guide, Section on Storage Access Patterns)

NVIDIA NIMs (NVIDIA Inference Microservices) are pre-built, GPU-accelerated microservices with standardized APIs, designed to simplify and accelerate AI model deployment across diverse environments—clouds, data centers, and edge devices. Their key value lies in enabling fast, turnkey inference without requiring custom deployment pipelines, reducing setup time and complexity. While community support and SDK deployment may be tangential benefits, they are not the primary focus of NIMs.

(Reference: NVIDIA NIMs Documentation, Overview Section)

GPUs and CPUs are architecturally distinct due to their optimization goals. GPUs feature thousands of simpler cores designed for massive parallelism, excelling at executing many lightweight threads concurrently—ideal for tasks like matrix operations in AI. CPUs, conversely, have fewer, more complex cores optimized for sequential processing and handling intricate control flows, making them suited for serial tasks. This divergence in design means GPUs outperform CPUs in parallel workloads, while CPUs excel in single-threaded performance, contradicting claims of identical architectures or interchangeable use.

(Reference: NVIDIA GPU Architecture Whitepaper, Section on GPU vs. CPU Design)

An NVIDIA Certified Server with RTX GPUs is optimized for real-time collaboration and rendering, supporting NVIDIA Virtual Workstation (vWS) software. This setup enables low-latency, multi-user graphics workloads, ideal for team-based design or visualization. T4 GPUs focus on inference efficiency, and DGX SuperPOD targets large-scale AI training, not collaborative rendering.

(Reference: NVIDIA AI Infrastructure and Operations Study Guide, Section on GPU Selection for Collaboration)

High-density workloads (e.g., GPU clusters for AI) strain data center resources, primarily power (to supply dense servers), cooling (to dissipate heat from tightly packed hardware), and physical space (to house equipment). While processing speed, bandwidth, and other factors matter, power, cooling, and space are the physical constraints most critical to deployment feasibility.

(Reference: NVIDIA AI Infrastructure and Operations Study Guide, Section on Data Center Resource Constraints)

InfiniBand is renowned for three key features: low latency (microsecond-scale communication), high bandwidth (100 Gb/s and beyond), and CPU offloads (via RDMA), which shift data transfer tasks to the network hardware, boosting system efficiency. High latency contradicts InfiniBand’s design, and GPU offloads are not a core networking feature, making low latency, high bandwidth, and CPU offloads the definitive trio.

(Reference: NVIDIA Networking Documentation, Section on InfiniBand Features)

NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA allows network adapters to directly access GPU memory, bypassing the CPU and operating system kernel. This accelerates data transfers between GPUs and CPUs (or other devices), reducing latency and CPU overhead in AI workflows, such as multi-node training. It doesn’t focus on power efficiency or unsynchronized memory sharing, making faster transfers its key benefit.

(Reference: NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA Documentation, Overview Section)