NCA-GENL — Blueprint Area and Topic Guide
Exam guide for the NVIDIA Certified Associate: Generative AI LLMs (NCA-GENL). NVIDIA publishes five weighted areas in the blueprint, plus ten topics covered. The topics develop the content; they are not ten domains with
Exam guide for the NVIDIA Certified Associate: Generative AI LLMs (NCA-GENL). NVIDIA publishes five weighted areas in the blueprint, plus ten topics covered. The topics develop the content; they are not ten domains with equal weight.
Verified on August 21, 2026 against the official NCA-GENL page. NVIDIA may change the blueprint and format: double-check them before booking.
| Official Weighted Area | Weight | Main Study Topics in This Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Core Machine Learning and AI Knowledge | 30% | Topics 1, 2, and fundamentals of 3 |
| Software Development | 24% | Topics 8, 9, and 10 |
| Experimentation | 22% | Topics 5, 6, and 7 |
| Data Analysis and Visualization | 14% | Topic 4 |
| Trustworthy AI | 10% | Alignment, guardrails, security, and responsible use from topics 3 and 10 |
Topic 1 — Fundamentals of Machine Learning and Neural Networks#
Types of Learning#
- Supervised learning: labeled data; classification (discrete label) and regression (continuous value).
- Unsupervised learning: without labels; clustering (K-means), dimensionality reduction (PCA, t-SNE).
- Self-supervised learning: the training signal comes from the data itself. This is how LLMs are pre-trained (predicting the next token).
- Reinforcement learning: agent, environment, reward. Foundation of RLHF.
Neural Networks#
- Neuron: weighted sum + bias + activation function (ReLU, GELU, sigmoid, tanh, softmax in the classification output layer).
- Backpropagation: calculates gradients of the loss with respect to the weights using the chain rule; gradient descent (and variants: SGD, Adam, AdamW) updates the weights.
- Loss functions: cross-entropy for classification and language modeling; MSE for regression.
- Learning rate: key hyperparameter; too high causes divergence, too low prevents convergence. Schedulers: warmup + cosine decay is the standard in LLMs.
- Overfitting: the model memorizes the training set and generalizes poorly. Mitigation: regularization (L2, dropout), early stopping, more data, data augmentation.
- Underfitting: the model is too simple; high loss also occurs in training.
Transformer Architecture (highly likely to appear)#
- Introduced in Attention Is All You Need (2017). Replaces recurrence (RNN/LSTM) with self-attention: each token attends to all others in parallel.
- Self-attention: Q (query), K (key), V (value);
softmax(QKᵀ/√d)·V. Scaling by √d stabilizes gradients. - Multi-head attention: multiple heads attend to different subspaces of representation.
- Positional encoding/embeddings: provide order to the sequence (attention is order-invariant). Modern variants: RoPE, ALiBi.
- Variants: encoder-only (BERT — understanding, classification), decoder-only (GPT, Llama — autoregressive generation), encoder-decoder (T5 — translation, seq2seq).
- Causal masking in decoders: each token only sees previous ones.
- Key advantage over RNN: full parallelization during training and better handling of long-range dependencies.
Tokenization and embeddings#
- Tokenization: text → tokens (subwords). Algorithms: BPE (GPT, Llama), WordPiece (BERT), SentencePiece/Unigram (T5). Subword tokenization balances a manageable vocabulary with coverage of rare words.
- Embeddings: dense vectors that capture semantics; cosine distance measures similarity. Foundation of semantic retrieval and RAG.
- Context window: maximum number of tokens the model processes at once.
GPU and CUDA (NVIDIA stack)#
- CUDA: NVIDIA's parallel computing platform; enables executing thousands of threads on the GPU. Deep learning is essentially massively parallel matrix multiplication → the GPU (thousands of cores, high memory bandwidth) vastly outperforms the CPU in throughput.
- cuDNN: optimized deep learning primitive library (convolutions, attention) built on CUDA. PyTorch/TensorFlow use it under the hood.
- Tensor Cores: hardware units for mixed-precision (FP16/BF16/FP8) matrix multiplication — much faster than FP32.
- Mixed precision training: training in FP16/BF16 with accumulation in FP32; saves memory and accelerates without losing quality.
- DGX: NVIDIA systems with multiple interconnected GPUs (NVLink) for large-scale training.
Scale and distributed training concepts#
- Data parallelism: each GPU holds a full copy of the model and processes a shard of the batch; gradients are averaged (all-reduce).
- Tensor parallelism: matrices of each layer are split across GPUs (necessary when the model doesn't fit on a single GPU).
- Pipeline parallelism: different layers on different GPUs, processing micro-batches in a pipeline.
- Scaling laws: loss improves predictably when scaling parameters, data, and compute jointly.
- NVLink: high-speed interconnect between NVIDIA GPUs; key for multi-GPU parallelism (DGX systems).
Exam pitfalls#
- Self-attention ≠ recurrence: the transformer does NOT process sequentially during training.
- BERT does not generate free text (encoder-only); GPT does (decoder-only).
- Overfitting is detected by comparing train vs. validation metrics, not by looking at train metrics alone.
- The GPU accelerates via data/matrix parallelism, not by "higher clock frequency".
- Softmax is the typical activation for the OUTPUT layer in multi-class classification; ReLU/GELU go in hidden layers.
- A token's embedding is not fixed per word in an LLM: attention layers produce contextual representations.
Topic 2 — Prompt Engineering#
Base techniques#
- Zero-shot: instruction only, no examples.
- Few-shot / in-context learning: input→output examples are included in the prompt; the model learns the pattern without updating weights.
- Chain-of-thought (CoT): asking for step-by-step reasoning ("Let's think step by step"); improves arithmetic/logical reasoning tasks.
- Self-consistency: sampling multiple reasoning chains and voting for the majority answer.
- System prompt: role/behavior instructions that condition the entire conversation; separated from the user turn.
- Delimiters and structure: separating instruction, context, and data (XML tags, ###) reduces ambiguity and prompt injection.
Generation Parameters#
- Temperature: rescales the probability distribution. Low (→0) = deterministic/greedy; high = more diversity and higher risk of hallucination.
- Top-k: samples only from the k most probable tokens.
- Top-p (nucleus): samples from the minimum set whose cumulative probability is ≥ p.
- Max tokens: limits output length (not quality).
- Frequency/presence penalties: reduce repetition.
- Rule of thumb: factual/extraction tasks → low temperature; brainstorming/creativity → high.
Advanced Techniques and Patterns#
- ReAct: alternating reasoning (thought) and actions (tool calls) with observations; the basis of agents.
- Prompt chaining: decomposing the task into several chained prompts (extract → transform → draft).
- Retrieval-augmented prompting: injecting retrieved context (RAG) into the prompt and requesting a grounded response with citations.
- Output constraints: requesting JSON with a schema, closed lists of values, or using the provider's structured output.
- Prompt templates and versioning: treating prompts as versioned and evaluated artifacts (prompt test datasets, A/B testing).
- Defense against prompt injection: separating instructions from data with delimiters, treating retrieved content as untrusted, validating outputs.
Exam Traps#
- Few-shot does NOT update model weights (that is fine-tuning).
- Temperature 0 does not guarantee factual correctness, only (near) determinism.
- CoT aids reasoning, not necessarily fact retrieval.
- Prompt engineering is the cheapest/fastest adaptation option; fine-tuning only when prompting is insufficient.
- Few-shot examples consume context window (and token cost) in EVERY call.
- Typical adaptation ladder in the exam: prompt engineering → RAG → fine-tuning → pre-training from scratch (from cheapest to most expensive).
Topic 3 — Alignment#
Why#
A pre-trained LLM only predicts the next token; alignment makes it helpful, honest, harmless and capable of following instructions.
Classic Pipeline#
- Pre-training: self-supervised on a massive corpus (predicting the next token).
- SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning) / instruction tuning: high-quality instruction→response pairs.
- RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback): humans rank responses by preference → a reward model is trained → the policy is optimized with PPO against that reward (with KL penalty to avoid drifting from the SFT model).
- Alternatives: DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) — optimizes directly on preferred/rejected pairs without an explicit reward model or RL; simpler and more stable. RLAIF: feedback is provided by another AI model. Constitutional AI: the model critiques and revises its outputs according to written principles.
Security and guardrails#
- Guardrails: input/output filters and validations (prohibited topics, PII, jailbreaks). In the NVIDIA stack: NeMo Guardrails — an open-source toolkit for defining programmable conversation rails (topics, safety, tool calls).
- Red teaming: deliberate attacks to uncover failures before production.
- Risks: jailbreaks, prompt injection, bias, toxicity, training data leakage.
- Hallucinations: fluent but false output; mitigation via RAG, grounding, source citation, and evaluation.
Fine-tuning as an alignment and adaptation tool#
- Full fine-tuning: updates all weights; maximum adaptation capability, highest cost, and risk of catastrophic forgetting.
- PEFT (parameter-efficient fine-tuning): LoRA/QLoRA, prompt tuning, adapters; trains only a minimal fraction of parameters.
- Instruction tuning: SFT on instruction→response pairs across many tasks; teaches the model to follow instructions generally.
- When NOT to fine-tune: if the problem is updatable knowledge (→ RAG) or format/style achievable via prompting.
Exam traps#
- RLHF trains a reward model from human comparisons, not from absolute labels.
- DPO ≠ RLHF under another name: DPO eliminates the reward model and the RL loop.
- SFT comes before RLHF, not the other way around.
- Guardrails complement model alignment; they do not replace it.
- Alignment reduces harmful behaviors but does not guarantee factual accuracy: an aligned model can still hallucinate.
Topic 4 — Data Analysis and Visualization#
- pandas: DataFrames;
describe(),groupby(),value_counts(), null handling (isna(),fillna(),dropna()). Standard EDA (exploratory data analysis) tool. - NumPy: n-dimensional arrays, vectorized operations; the numerical foundation of the entire stack.
- matplotlib / seaborn: visualization. Choosing the correct chart:
- Histogram: distribution of a single numerical variable.
- Box plot: median, quartiles, and outliers.
- Scatter plot: relationship between two numerical variables (visual correlation).
- Bar chart: comparison across categories.
- Line chart: time series / training curves (loss vs. epoch).
- Heatmap: correlation matrices, confusion matrices, attention maps.
- Basic statistics: mean vs. median (median resists outliers), standard deviation, percentiles, correlation ≠ causation, Pearson correlation (linear) vs. Spearman (monotonic).
- In LLMs: analyze sequence length distributions (to choose max length and truncation/padding strategy), class balance, corpus quality/duplicates.
- RAPIDS / cuDF (NVIDIA stack): GPU-accelerated, pandas-like processing for large datasets.
Typical EDA workflow (common scenario)#
df.info()/df.describe(): types, nulls, ranges.- Nulls and duplicates: quantify before deciding on imputation or deletion.
- Univariate distributions (histograms) and outliers (box plots).
- Bivariate relationships (scatter plots, correlation heatmaps).
- Document findings that dictate preprocessing (constant features, high cardinality, class imbalance).
Exam traps#
- To visualize outliers: box plot (not bar chart).
- For the distribution of a single variable: histogram (not scatter plot).
- High correlation does not imply causation.
- Pie charts are almost never the correct answer: for comparisons → bar chart; for temporal evolution → line chart.
- Training curves (loss vs. step/epoch) are visualized with line charts (TensorBoard/W&B).
Topic 5 — Experimentation#
Evaluation Metrics#
- Classification: accuracy (misleading with imbalanced classes), precision (of the predicted positives, how many are correct), recall (of the actual positives, how many are detected), F1 (harmonic mean), confusion matrix, ROC-AUC.
- Language modeling: perplexity — exponential of the mean cross-entropy; lower is better = the model predicts the corpus better. Compare models on the same tokenizer/corpus.
- Text generation:
- BLEU: n-gram precision vs. reference (historical in translation).
- ROUGE: n-gram/subsequence recall vs. reference (summarization). ROUGE-N, ROUGE-L (longest common subsequence).
- BERTScore: semantic similarity using embeddings, not just literal overlap.
- Human evaluation and LLM-as-a-judge: for open-ended quality (helpfulness, coherence) where automatic metrics fall short.
- LLM Benchmarks: MMLU (multitask knowledge), HellaSwag (common sense), HumanEval (code), TruthfulQA (truthfulness).
Methodology#
- Train/validation/test split: train / tune hyperparameters and early stopping / final evaluation only once. Never tune against the test set.
- Cross-validation (k-fold): more robust estimation with scarce data (rare in LLM pre-training due to cost, common in classical ML).
- Data leakage: test information contaminates the train set (duplicates, benchmark contamination in pre-training corpus) → inflated metrics.
- Baseline: always compare against something simple before attributing improvements.
- Training curves: train loss decreases and val loss increases → overfitting.
Specific Evaluation of RAG Systems#
- Retrieval: context recall (was the necessary information retrieved?), context precision (is the retrieved information relevant?), hit rate, MRR.
- Generation: faithfulness (is the answer supported by the retrieved context?), answer relevance.
- Frameworks: RAGAS and custom evals with LLM-as-a-judge; always separate retrieval failure from generation failure.
Exam Traps#
- Perplexity only applies to probabilistic language models, and lower is better.
- BLEU ≈ precision-oriented (translation); ROUGE ≈ recall-oriented (summarization).
- With 99% negative class, 99% accuracy tells you nothing: look at precision/recall/F1.
- F1 is the HARMONIC mean of precision and recall (penalizes imbalance), not the arithmetic mean.
- High recall with low precision = many false positives; high precision with low recall = real positives are missed. The question usually asks which to prioritize based on the cost of error (e.g., cancer detection → recall).
Topic 6 — Data Preprocessing and Feature Engineering#
Classic Preprocessing#
- Cleaning: nulls (imputation via mean/median/mode or removal), duplicates, outliers.
- Scaling: standardization (z-score, mean 0 and standard deviation 1) vs min-max normalization (range [0,1]). Required for scale-sensitive models; fit ONLY on train data to avoid information leakage.
- Categorical encoding: one-hot (nominal, few categories), label/ordinal encoding (ordinal), embeddings (high cardinality).
- Feature engineering: creating informative variables from raw data; feature selection (correlation, importance).
- Imbalanced data: oversampling (SMOTE), undersampling, class weights.
Preprocessing for LLMs#
- Corpus pipeline: deduplication (exact and fuzzy/MinHash), quality and language filtering, PII removal, benchmark decontamination.
- Tokenization as a preprocessing step: truncation and padding to fixed length; attention mask to ignore padding.
- Chunking for RAG: splitting documents (fixed, by sentences, semantic) with overlap; chunk size affects retrieval recall.
- Data formats for SFT: prompt→completion pairs, chat templates (system/user/assistant roles).
- Data augmentation in NLP: paraphrasing, back-translation, synthetic generation with LLMs.
- NeMo Curator (NVIDIA stack): GPU-accelerated tools for curating large-scale corpora (dedup, filtering, PII).
Embeddings as Features#
- Text → embedding (sentence-transformers or API) → dense feature for classification, clustering, semantic deduplication, or retrieval.
- Cosine similarity between embeddings is the basis of semantic search; normalize vectors when the index requires it.
Exam Traps#
- The scaler is fitted on train data and applied to test data (fitting on the entire dataset = leakage).
- One-hot for unordered categories; ordinal encoding only if there is a true order.
- Corpus deduplication improves generalization and reduces memorization.
- The attention mask marks which tokens are real (1) and which are padding (0); without it, the model attends to the padding.
Topic 7 — Experiment Design#
- Measurable hypothesis before experimenting: which metric, what expected improvement, on which dataset.
- Change one variable at a time (or use structured search): if you change the model, data, and prompt simultaneously, you won't know what caused the improvement.
- Hyperparameter tuning: grid search (exhaustive, expensive), random search (more efficient in high dimensions), Bayesian optimization (models the surface and selects the next point based on criteria). Typical fine-tuning hyperparameters: learning rate, batch size, epochs, LoRA rank.
- A/B testing: comparing two variants in production with split traffic; requires statistical significance (sufficient sample size, p-value/intervals).
- Ablation study: removing a component to measure its real contribution.
- Reproducibility: fixing random seeds, versioning data/code/configs, logging experiments (MLflow, Weights & Biases, TensorBoard for curves).
- Early stopping: stopping when the validation metric stops improving (patience).
- Cost: estimate GPU-hours; start with small models/datasets to iterate quickly and scale what works.
Key LLM Fine-Tuning Hyperparameters#
- Learning rate: the most sensitive; for fine-tuning, much lower values are used than in pre-training (e.g., 1e-5–2e-4 with LoRA).
- Batch size (and gradient accumulation when memory is insufficient).
- Epochs: few (1–3 typical in SFT); more epochs → risk of overfitting/catastrophic forgetting.
- LoRA rank (r) and alpha: adapter capacity vs. memory.
- Warmup ratio and scheduler: stabilize the training start.
Exam Traps#
- Random search usually beats grid search with the same budget when few dimensions matter.
- The test set is used once at the end; hyperparameter selection goes against validation.
- An ablation measures the contribution of components; an A/B test compares complete variants in production.
- An experiment without a prior hypothesis or metric is not an experiment: it is exploration (valid, but not conclusive).
Topic 8 — Software Development#
- Git: branches, merge/rebase, pull requests, code review. Version configs and (with DVC or similar) data/models.
- Environments:
venv/conda,requirements.txt/pyproject.tomlwith pinned versions for reproducibility. - Testing:
pytest; unit tests (pure functions: parsers, chunkers), integration tests (full pipeline), and model behavior tests (evals as regression tests). Mock LLM APIs in unit tests for cost/determinism. - CI/CD: pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) that run lint + tests + evals on every change; CD to deploy models/services.
- Containers: Docker packages code+dependencies+user drivers; base images from NGC (NVIDIA GPU Cloud) bring CUDA/cuDNN/frameworks already optimized and versioned.
nvidia-container-toolkitexposes the GPU to the container. Kubernetes orchestrates at scale (with GPU operator). - Code quality: PEP 8, type hints, linters (ruff/flake8), formatters (black), docstrings.
- Logging and error handling: structured logging, retries with backoff against API rate limits, timeouts.
- Secrets: API keys in environment variables or secret managers, never hardcoded or committed.
Specific Best Practices for LLM Projects#
- Version prompts alongside code (or in a registry) and cover them with regression evals in CI.
- Log cost per request and tokens consumed as a first-class metric.
- Validate and sanitize model outputs before using them (parse JSON with schema, not fragile regex).
- Feature flags / canary to deploy model or prompt changes gradually.
Exam Traps#
- Docker guarantees environment reproducibility; it does not accelerate the model itself.
- NGC images are the recommended path for consistent GPU environments.
- API keys never go in source code or in the repo.
- Unit test ≠ model eval: the first validates your code with mocks; the second validates model behavior with datasets.
Topic 9 — Python Libraries for LLMs#
- PyTorch: dominant deep learning framework for LLMs; tensors, autograd,
nn.Module, DataLoader;.to("cuda")moves tensors/models to GPU. - Hugging Face Transformers:
AutoTokenizer,AutoModelForCausalLM,pipeline()for fast inference,Trainerfor fine-tuning. Hub of pre-trained models/weights. - Hugging Face Datasets: efficient loading and processing of datasets (
map, streaming). - PEFT: parameter-efficient fine-tuning — LoRA (low-rank matrices over frozen weights; trains <1% of parameters), QLoRA (LoRA on a 4-bit quantized model). Drastically reduces memory and cost compared to full fine-tuning.
- sentence-transformers: embedding models for semantic search.
- LangChain / LlamaIndex: LLM application orchestration — chains, RAG, agents, connectors to vector stores.
- Vector databases: FAISS (library), Milvus, Pinecone, Chroma, pgvector; similarity search (ANN) over embeddings.
- scikit-learn: classical ML, splits (
train_test_split), metrics (classification_report), baselines. - OpenAI SDK / API clients: request-response pattern with role-based messages; token streaming.
- NVIDIA Stack: NeMo (end-to-end framework for training/customizing LLMs: SFT, PEFT, RLHF, with integrated parallelism), RAPIDS/cuDF (GPU dataframes), CUDA Python/CuPy.
Minimal snippets to recognize#
# Inferencia rápida con Transformers
import os
from transformers import pipeline
model_id = os.getenv("HF_MODEL_ID", "Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507")
gen = pipeline("text-generation", model=model_id, dtype="auto", device_map="auto")
out = gen("Explica CUDA en una frase:", max_new_tokens=50, temperature=0.2)
# Tokenización con padding/truncation y tensores en GPU
from transformers import AutoTokenizer
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("bert-base-uncased")
batch = tok(texts, padding=True, truncation=True, max_length=512, return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")
# LoRA con PEFT
from peft import LoraConfig, get_peft_model
model = get_peft_model(base_model, LoraConfig(r=16, lora_alpha=32, task_type="CAUSAL_LM"))
model.print_trainable_parameters() # ~0.x% del total
Exam traps#
- LoRA freezes base weights and trains small adapters; it does not train the entire model.
Transformersprovides models and training;LangChainorchestrates applications over already served models.- FAISS searches by embedding similarity; it is not a relational database.
return_tensors="pt"returns PyTorch tensors; the model and its inputs must be on the same device (CPU or CUDA).
Topic 10 — LLM Integration and Deployment#
Inference optimization#
- Quantization: reduce precision of weights/activations (FP16 → INT8/INT4/FP8): less memory, higher throughput, with generally small quality loss. Post-training quantization (PTQ) vs quantization-aware training (QAT).
- Distillation: train a small model (student) to mimic a large one (teacher).
- Pruning: remove unimportant weights/structures.
- KV cache: cache keys/values of already generated tokens to avoid recomputing them in autoregressive generation; its memory grows with context and batch.
- Batching: grouping requests. In-flight/continuous batching: dynamically adds and removes sequences from the batch during generation → much better GPU utilization than static batching.
- Serving metrics: latency (incl. time-to-first-token), throughput (tokens/s), cost per 1K tokens; the latency-throughput trade-off is managed with batching.
NVIDIA deployment stack (highly likely to appear)#
- TensorRT-LLM: compiles/optimizes LLMs for inference on NVIDIA GPUs — kernel fusion, quantization (INT8/FP8), paged KV cache, in-flight batching, multi-GPU tensor parallelism.
- Triton Inference Server: open-source multi-framework inference server (TensorRT, PyTorch, ONNX...); exposes HTTP/gRPC, performs dynamic batching, serves multiple models and versions concurrently, metrics for Prometheus. TensorRT-LLM backend for serving optimized LLMs.
- NIM (NVIDIA Inference Microservices): containerized microservices with pre-optimized models and standard API (OpenAI-compatible) for deployment on any GPU-enabled infrastructure.
- NGC: catalog of containers, pre-trained models, and GPU-optimized Helm charts.
- Open-source alternatives to recognize: vLLM (PagedAttention), Hugging Face TGI.
Integration in applications#
- API Pattern: REST/gRPC service in front of the model; streaming (SSE) to display tokens as they are generated and improve perceived latency.
- RAG as an integration pattern: context retrieval (vector DB) + grounded generation; updates knowledge without re-training and reduces hallucinations.
- Scaling: replicas + load balancing; autoscaling in Kubernetes; model parallelism (tensor/pipeline) when the model does not fit in a single GPU.
- Production monitoring: latency, throughput, error rate, cost, and quality (input drift, user feedback, continuous evaluations); prompt/response logging in compliance with privacy.
Memory Estimation (calculation that falls)#
- Quick rule: parameters × bytes per parameter. A 7B model in FP16 (2 bytes) ≈ 14 GB just in weights; in INT8 ≈ 7 GB; in INT4 ≈ 3.5 GB.
- Add the KV cache (grows with context length × batch size) and activations.
- If it does not fit in a single GPU: quantization, tensor parallelism, or offloading.
Exam Traps#
- Quantization reduces memory and accelerates; it does NOT improve model quality.
- Triton = multi-framework server; TensorRT-LLM = optimization/runtime engine for LLMs. They are combined: TensorRT-LLM as Triton's backend.
- Dynamic/in-flight batching improves throughput; per-request latency may increase slightly (trade-off).
- RAG adds external knowledge without touching weights; fine-tuning changes weights but does not provide access to real-time data.
- Distillation trains a NEW smaller model; quantization compresses the SAME model.
- Throughput and latency are not the same: aggressive batching increases total tokens/s but may worsen each user's latency.
NVIDIA Stack Final Cheat Sheet (one line per component)#
| Component | What it is | Phase |
|---|---|---|
| CUDA | Parallel computing platform on GPU; foundation of the entire stack | Cross-cutting |
| cuDNN | Optimized deep learning primitives on top of CUDA | Training and inference |
| RAPIDS / cuDF | GPU-accelerated data science (pandas-like) | Data |
| NeMo | End-to-end framework for training/customizing LLMs (SFT, PEFT, RLHF) | Training |
| NeMo Curator | Scale corpus curation (dedup, filtering, PII) | Data |
| NeMo Guardrails | Programmable rails for conversational safety | Application |
| TensorRT-LLM | LLM inference optimization and runtime (quantization, in-flight batching) | Inference |
| Triton Inference Server | Multi-framework serving with dynamic batching and metrics | Inference |
| NIM | Containerized inference microservices with standard API | Deployment |
| NGC | Catalog of containers, models, and Helm charts | Distribution |
| DGX / NVLink | Multi-GPU systems and high-speed interconnection | Infrastructure |
How to use this guide#
- Study the ten topics and tag each failure with one of the five weighted areas (map in the README).
- Review with flashcards.md in short spaced sessions.
- Take the simulacro-50-preguntas.md in 60 minutes and review every explanation in the published simulator, including the questions you answer correctly.