NCP-AIO Installation and Deployment Practice Question
A platform engineer is preparing a bare-metal Ubuntu 22.04 server with four A100 GPUs for an NVIDIA AI Enterprise deployment. The GPUs are not yet visible to the operating system tooling. Which command should the engineer run to confirm the driver loaded successfully and that all four GPUs are enumerated with their current driver version?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that seeing the GPUs in a PCI listing proves the driver is installed, when PCI enumeration and driver binding are independent states.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
nvidia-smi
The NVIDIA kernel driver is the foundation of every AI Enterprise workload, and nvidia-smi is the standard utility that both triggers a driver query and renders the full GPU inventory with driver and CUDA versions. Administrative toolkits such as DCGM or the container toolkit sit above the driver and only report meaningful data once the driver has bound successfully to all adapters.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
dcgmi discovery -l
Why it's wrong here
dcgmi discovery -l enumerates GPUs through the Data Center GPU Manager stack. DCGM is a separate monitoring and diagnostics package that must be installed and running on top of a functioning driver. It is therefore the wrong tool for a first post-install driver check on a node where AI Enterprise has not yet been layered.
- ✗
nvidia-container-cli --info
Why it's wrong here
nvidia-container-cli inspects the NVIDIA Container Toolkit's view of devices and capabilities for container injection. It reports container-runtime metadata rather than a raw hardware inventory, and it depends on the driver already being healthy. It cannot serve as the primary verification that all four GPUs enumerated after a fresh driver install.
- ✓
nvidia-smi
Why this is correct
nvidia-smi queries the loaded NVIDIA kernel driver and prints every enumerated GPU together with the driver version and CUDA version. On a freshly prepared AI Enterprise node it is the canonical first check that the driver bound to all four A100 devices before any container runtime or GPU Operator work begins.
- ✗
lspci -d 10de:
Why it's wrong here
lspci lists PCI devices by vendor ID and will show the NVIDIA adapters physically present on the bus. However, it reports PCI topology only; it does not confirm that the NVIDIA kernel driver bound to the devices, nor does it display the loaded driver version, so it is insufficient for validating a driver installation.
About these practice questions
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official NVIDIA exam blueprint
This NCP-AIO practice question is part of Courseiva's free NVIDIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the NCP-AIO exam.