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NVIDIA NCP-AII study materials
NVIDIA NCP-AII study resources

NVIDIA NCP-AII: GPU and Accelerator Configuration

NVIDIA NCP-AII · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

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GPU and Accelerator Configuration

What this domain tests

Making a healthy GPU behave predictably: persistence mode, ECC policy, MIG partitioning, NVLink state, and clock and power limits. The exam expects command-level familiarity with nvidia-smi and its MIG and NVLink subcommands.

Core rules

  • Persistence mode. nvidia-smi -pm 1 keeps the driver loaded so CUDA context creation is milliseconds instead of seconds; nvidia-persistenced makes the setting survive reboots.
  • ECC. Toggling ECC requires an idle GPU and a reset, and it cannot be changed with live processes. Uncorrectable errors surface as Xid 48 and can drive dynamic page retirement.
  • MIG. nvidia-smi -mig 1 enables partitioning into GPU instances and compute instances; profile names encode compute slices and memory, e.g. 1g.5gb on A100 40GB. Memory and SMs are dedicated, not shared, which is what makes MIG a multi-tenant isolation boundary.
  • NVLink. nvidia-smi nvlink -s reports link status, -e reports CRC and replay errors, and nvidia-smi topo -m prints the GPU-to-GPU matrix where NV# means NVLink and SYS means a cross-socket PCIe hop.

Worked example

A team wants seven isolated 5 GB inference tenants on one A100 40GB. Drain all processes first, run nvidia-smi -mig 1, then nvidia-smi mig -cgi 1g.5gb -C to create seven GPU instances with their default compute instances. Seven fits exactly because the 1g profile on the 40GB card is 5 GB; on an 80GB A100 the smallest profile is 1g.10gb, so the same request would need re-planning. The reasoning: MIG capacity is bounded by both the slice count limit (seven) and the memory granularity of that specific SKU.

Traps that cost marks

Creating instances without enabling MIG mode first; expecting a MIG slice to use NVLink bandwidth to another slice; assuming clock and power controls stay fully available while MIG is enabled; forgetting that a reboot clears persistence mode unless persistenced is running.