NVIDIA NCA-AIIO case studies
NVIDIA NCA-AIIO · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The NVIDIA-Certified Associate: AI Infrastructure and Operations (NCA-AIIO) is NVIDIA's entry-level certification covering the foundational concepts of AI computing as they relate to infrastructure and operations. It targets professionals who need a working vocabulary of accelerated computing rather than deep model-development expertise - data center technicians, systems and network administrators, DevOps engineers, solution and systems architects, IT managers, and business-line owners. The NVIDIA NCA-AIIO case studies are 5 cases and about 4,072 words.
1The 18% Perplexity Win That Broke Citation Accuracy
A team fine-tunes a 7B decoder to summarize legal filings. To shorten context they replace the 32k BPE tokenizer with a 50k vocabulary trained on 40M pages of their own corpus; the average document drops from 3,100 to 2,050 tokens.
781 words, about 4 min2RAG, Fine-Tune, or Prompting Under a 1.5s Budget
A support-ops team must lift automated resolution from 62% to 78% on a 12,000-document help center that changes roughly 200 pages a week. They have 200 human-labeled resolved tickets, two on-prem L40S GPUs (48 GB each), 8 requests/s at peak, and a 1.5 s p95 latency budget for the whole request.
834 words, about 4 min3Sizing a 13B Inference Fleet When Memory Is Not the Constraint
You are sizing a serving fleet for a 13B chat model at FP16 (26 GB of weights) on 4-GPU A100 80 GB nodes. Workload: 1,500 input tokens, 200 output tokens, 20 requests/s at peak.
802 words, about 4 min4Why 64 GPUs Ran Only 1.25x Faster Than 32
A 7B dense model trains at 44% MFU on 32 A100s (4 nodes) with a 1.00 s step time. The team scales to 64 GPUs (8 nodes) over 200 Gb/s InfiniBand, holding per-GPU micro-batch and sequence length constant, so per-GPU work per step is unchanged.
789 words, about 4 min5Canary Gate: A 1.3-Point Regression on 1,200 Ratings
A summarization model v3 has run at 10% of traffic for 48 hours against a v2 baseline. Volume in the canary arm was about 40,000 requests.
866 words, about 4 min