NCA-AIIO cheat sheet

Exam at a glance

Domain weightings

How much of the exam each domain covers. Spend your study time in proportion — the heavier the domain, the more questions you'll see.

Key terms

GPU

A GPU (graphics processing unit) is a massively parallel processor that accelerates AI training and inference far beyond a CPU. NCA-AIIO covers GPU computing fundamentals as essential AI knowledge.

CUDA

CUDA is NVIDIA's parallel computing platform and programming model that lets software use the GPU for general-purpose computation. NCA-AIIO covers it as the base of the NVIDIA software stack.

cuDNN

cuDNN (CUDA Deep Neural Network library) is an NVIDIA library of GPU-accelerated primitives for deep learning frameworks. NCA-AIIO covers it within the NVIDIA software stack for AI workloads.

Tensor Core

A Tensor Core is a specialized unit in NVIDIA GPUs that accelerates the matrix math used in deep learning training and inference. NCA-AIIO covers Tensor Cores when explaining why GPUs accelerate AI.

NVIDIA DGX

NVIDIA DGX is a family of purpose-built AI systems that integrate multiple data center GPUs, networking, and software for training and inference. NCA-AIIO covers DGX and HGX systems in the AI infrastructure domain.

NVLink

NVLink is NVIDIA's high-speed interconnect that links GPUs directly for fast memory sharing within and across systems. NCA-AIIO covers NVLink and NVSwitch as AI infrastructure networking.

NVSwitch

NVSwitch is an NVIDIA switch chip that connects many GPUs over NVLink so they communicate at full bandwidth. NCA-AIIO covers it for multi-GPU AI infrastructure.

InfiniBand

InfiniBand is a high-throughput, low-latency networking fabric used to connect nodes in AI and HPC clusters. NCA-AIIO covers it as multi-node networking in the AI infrastructure domain.

Triton Inference Server

NVIDIA Triton Inference Server is open-source software that serves trained AI models at scale across frameworks and hardware. NCA-AIIO covers it in the NVIDIA software stack for inference.

NVIDIA AI Enterprise

NVIDIA AI Enterprise is a supported software suite of frameworks and tools for developing and deploying AI on NVIDIA infrastructure. NCA-AIIO covers it as part of the AI software stack.

NGC

NGC (NVIDIA GPU Cloud) is NVIDIA's catalog of GPU-optimized containers, models, and Helm charts for AI workloads. NCA-AIIO covers NGC as a source of AI software in the NVIDIA stack.

Multi-Instance GPU

Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) is a capability that partitions a single NVIDIA GPU into isolated instances for multi-tenant workloads. NCA-AIIO covers MIG and vGPU for virtualization in AI operations.

DCGM

NVIDIA Data Center GPU Manager (DCGM) is a suite of tools for monitoring and managing GPU health and utilization in a cluster. NCA-AIIO covers it for monitoring in the AI operations domain.

Inference

Inference is the phase where a trained AI model generates predictions on new data, as opposed to training. NCA-AIIO covers the training-versus-inference distinction as essential AI knowledge.