01. A hospital group must train models on petabytes of imaging archives. The data cannot leave the country under regulation, moving petabytes across a WAN each cycle is impractical, and the archives already reside in the group's own data centers. Latency-tolerant training runs weekly.
Which placement decision is best justified, and why?
a) Run training at edge nodes embedded inside each individual imaging device on the hospital floor
b) Train on-prem, since data gravity and residency rules both anchor the workload where the data lives
c) Stream the archives to a cloud region on demand per batch to avoid one bulk migration
d) Move all imaging archives to a public-cloud region and train there for elastic, on-demand GPU capacity
02. During training, an architect observes that model accelerators are frequently stalling while waiting for data. Profiling shows the bottleneck is the host CPU, which is busy copying data from storage into system memory and then to GPU memory on every batch.
Which capability most directly addresses this bottleneck?
a) Adding more host CPU cores and threads so the same storage-to-GPU bounce-buffer copy is parallelized across them.
b) Compressing model checkpoints with a faster codec so they occupy less capacity on the shared checkpoint disk.
c) Switching the training data from a file protocol to an object protocol, which eliminates the need for GPUs to read data.
d) GPUDirect Storage, a direct path between storage and GPU memory that bypasses the host-CPU bounce-buffer copy.
03. A research group runs a distributed training job where many GPU nodes must read the same large dataset concurrently and sustain very high aggregate read bandwidth. They want a parallel file system layered over high-throughput arrays rather than a single-controller file server.
Which combination best matches this parallel-throughput requirement?
a) E-Series/EF-Series arrays serving a parallel file system such as BeeGFS that stripes data across nodes for aggregate throughput.
b) Local NVMe in each GPU node with no shared dataset, forcing every node to hold a private copy.
c) A single object bucket accessed one key at a time over a low-bandwidth out-of-band management link already shared with cluster monitoring traffic.
d) One scale-up file controller exporting a single share, with all GPU nodes funneled through that one controller.
04. Before training, a team must scan a large unstructured file estate to discover where sensitive and personal data resides so it can be excluded or masked from the training corpus.
Which type of NetApp capability is the best fit for this discovery-and-mapping step?
a) A continuous replication/sync service such as CopySync that keeps a source and destination in step as data changes
b) Data classification (for example, BlueXP classification) that scans and categorizes data to reveal sensitive and personal data
c) A block-level snapshot schedule on the storage array that captures periodic point-in-time copies for protection
d) A high-speed file migration engine such as XCP that copies billions of files between heterogeneous storage systems at very high sustained throughput
05. A retail analytics team has three years of transaction logs but no labels indicating which customers belong to which behavioral segment. They want the model to discover natural groupings on its own so marketing can target each cluster differently.
Which category of machine-learning algorithm fits this task?
a) Unsupervised learning
b) Reinforcement learning
c) Supervised regression
d) Supervised learning
06. A team is designing an autonomous-inspection drone program. They plan to train large models centrally in the cloud, then run inference on the drones themselves in the field. A stakeholder asks them to name the trade-off that most directly drives this split of train-in-cloud, infer-at-edge.
Which trade-off best explains the split?
a) Inference requires far more raw compute than training does, so only the large centralized cloud accelerators can ever realistically complete a single inference pass
b) Cloud training permanently removes any need to ever retrain or update the deployed field models again
c) Training is a heavy, latency-tolerant batch job suited to centralized scale, while inference must be low-latency and work even when the field link degrades
d) Edge devices cannot run trained models at all, so every single inference request must always travel back to the cloud endpoint
07. A team is building its first AI training cluster and is comparing interconnect options for the back-end fabric that carries traffic between GPU servers during distributed training.
Which characteristic most directly explains why InfiniBand is frequently chosen over conventional Ethernet for this specific fabric?
a) It is the only fabric that can physically connect to storage systems, so Ethernet cannot reach the storage tier at all.
b) It is engineered for very low latency and lossless transport, suiting the tightly synchronized collective communication of training.
c) It automatically transcodes training data into object format inline, so that no file or block protocol is ever required.
d) It removes the need for any switching hardware because every node in the cluster connects point-to-point directly to every other node.
08. An architect is planning the accelerator memory needed to serve a trained model for inference, before adding any retrieval or agent features.
Which factor most directly determines the baseline amount of memory required just to hold the model ready to serve?
a) The number of epochs and the learning-rate schedule used during the original training run
b) The size of the labeled dataset used to train the model and the number of features it contained
c) The number of concurrent users expected on the first day of the production rollout
d) The size of the model's parameter weights, which must be loaded into memory to run inference
09. Two teams compare their plans. Team A intends to build a new model from the ground up for a novel task. Team B intends to fine-tune an existing pretrained model for a narrower version of that task.
Which statement correctly contrasts what each effort primarily requires?
a) Building assembles a large dataset, model code, and training compute from scratch; fine-tuning adapts an existing model with only a smaller task dataset
b) Fine-tuning requires more data and compute than building because it must relearn general language from scratch plus the new task
c) Building needs only the model code because the weights are learned entirely automatically with no dataset at all; fine-tuning is the path that instead needs the large labeled dataset
d) Both require identical data and compute because fine-tuning re-trains every layer from random initialization just as building does
10. A bank must satisfy auditors who demand full reproducibility of any deployed credit-risk model: given a model version, the team must reconstruct the exact training data, be able to re-run experiments against that frozen data, and prove the data was not silently altered afterward. Storage capacity for endless full duplicates is not available.
Which two NetApp mechanisms, used together, best deliver this reproducible, tamper-evident lineage efficiently?
(Choose two.)
a) Enabling deduplication and compression, whose block maps by themselves establish and prove the data lineage.
b) A Snapshot taken at each training run to freeze the exact dataset state as an immutable, space-efficient reference for that model version.
c) A writable clone of that Snapshot so auditors can re-run experiments against the frozen data without altering or duplicating the original.
d) Relying on Data Infrastructure Insights dashboards as the authoritative system of record for the data state.
e) Keeping a full second copy of every dataset revision on a separate volume for the audit record.