NVIDIA-Certified Associate: Accelerated Data Science

NCA-ADS (NVIDIA-Certified Associate: Accelerated Data Science) is an entry-level NVIDIA certification that validates proficiency with GPU-accelerated tools and libraries for data science workflows, such as RAPIDS cuDF, cuML and Dask. NVIDIA recommends 1 to 2 years of experience in accelerated data science.

NVIDIA lists 50 to 60 questions in 60 minutes, taken online with remote proctoring through a Certiverse account. The exam is in English, and NVIDIA does not publish the passing score.

The exam costs $125 per attempt. The certification is valid for two years from issuance, and you recertify by retaking the exam. Passing earns a digital badge and an optional certificate.

Eight sections: Data Manipulation and Preparation (23%), Machine Learning With NVIDIA RAPIDS (16%), Data Science Pipelines and Workflow Automation (13%), Descriptive Analysis and Visualization (13%), Foundations of Accelerated Data Science (12%), Introductory MLOps Practices (10%), Advanced Data Structures (7%) and Software and Environment Management (6%).

NCA-ADS is NVIDIA's associate (entry-level) data science exam and asks for 1 to 2 years of experience. NCP-ADS (NVIDIA-Certified Professional: Accelerated Data Science) is the professional-level exam and asks for 2 to 3 years of hands-on experience. Preporato has practice exams for both.

Six timed practice exams of 60 questions each, 360 in total, with each exam weighted like NVIDIA's eight sections. Every option has an explanation, and every question links to the documentation behind it, from RAPIDS and XGBoost to scikit-learn, pandas, Dask and MLflow. Each exam also includes six Select TWO questions for extra depth. The first five questions of each exam are free to try.

NVIDIA's learning path lists three self-paced courses: Accelerating End-to-End Data Science Workflows, Best Practices in Feature Engineering for Tabular Data with GPU Acceleration, and Accelerated Machine Learning for Time Series Forecasting, plus a study guide. Then take timed practice exams, review every explanation, run the workflows yourself in hands-on labs, and book the exam once you score 80% or more on several practice exams.

Yes. Preporato Pro includes hands-on labs for skills in NVIDIA's NCA-ADS topic list: data cleaning and feature engineering, class imbalance, PCA and clustering; a RAPIDS pipeline with cuDF and cuML on a GPU; scikit-learn and XGBoost models with cross-validation, metrics and decision thresholds; time series backtesting; MLflow tracking, drift monitoring, versioning and model serving; GPU profiling and monitoring; and Docker and Git. They run in the browser with nothing to install, the GPU labs on NVIDIA GPU pods, and every step is checked automatically. Descriptive statistics, visualization and graph analytics have no lab yet.