A cloud engineer is looking to provision a virtual machine for machine learning using the NVIDIA Virtual Machine Image (VMI) and Rapids. What…

The NVIDIA Virtual Machine Image (VMI) tailored for RAPIDS is designed to be a turnkey solution for data scientists and ML engineers. When deployed from a cloud service provider (CSP) marketplace, it automatically provisions a complete, ready-to-run environment. This stack includes the foundational components like the Ubuntu Server OS, the necessary NVIDIA Driver for GPU hardware access, and a containerization platform consisting of Docker-CE and the NVIDIA Container Toolkit. It also includes command-line utilities for the CSP and NVIDIA's NGC catalog. Crucially, this specific VMI comes with the RAPIDS libraries pre-installed, enabling the development team to start working immediately without manual setup of the core data science framework.

A. This option is incorrect because it describes a general-purpose NVIDIA GPU-Optimized VMI but omits the RAPIDS libraries, which are central to the scenario.

B. This option is incorrect as it lists CentOS, which is not the typical base OS for this VMI, and it critically omits both the NVIDIA Driver and the RAPIDS libraries.

D. This option is incorrect because it lacks the NVIDIA Driver, which is essential for any GPU functionality, and also omits the specified RAPIDS libraries.

1. NVIDIA on Google Cloud Marketplace: The official description for the RAPIDS Virtual Machine Image on the Google Cloud Marketplace explicitly lists the included software. It states, "This RAPIDS VM Image contains the RAPIDS software suite, the NVIDIA driver, Docker, and the NVIDIA container toolkit." This confirms that a VMI specifically for RAPIDS includes the full stack described in the correct answer.

Source: Google Cloud Marketplace, "RAPIDS by NVIDIA" product page, Solution Details section.

2. NVIDIA AI Enterprise Documentation: The documentation for the general NVIDIA AI Enterprise VMI confirms the inclusion of the base components. While the general VMI serves as a foundation to run containers, specific marketplace offerings like the RAPIDS VMI are created for a complete out-of-the-box experience by including the framework itself. The base stack is consistently documented as: "The NVIDIA AI Enterprise virtual machine image (VMI) ... provides a pre-configured environment on Ubuntu Server with the NVIDIA driver, Docker, NVIDIA Container Toolkit, and NGC Catalog CLI installed."

Source: NVIDIA AI Enterprise Deployment Guide (for various platforms), "About the NVIDIA AI Enterprise Virtual Machine Image" section.