After initial setup and health checks, the DGX H100 system administrator wants to verify that...

The definitive " smoke test " for an NVIDIA-accelerated container environment is running nvidia-smi from within a container pulled from the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC). Option D is the only 100% verified command because it includes all three necessary components:

--gpus all: This flag is required by the NVIDIA Container Toolkit to map the host ' s GPU device nodes and driver libraries into the container. Without it (as in Option C), the container will not " see " any GPUs.

nvcr.io/nvidia/cuda: Using an official CUDA base image from NGC ensures that the container has the necessary user-space libraries to communicate with the NVIDIA driver on the host.

nvidia-smi: This command specifically queries the driver and hardware. If it successfully prints the GPU table (showing the H100/A100 modules, their temperatures, and memory), it proves that the entire stack—from the physical hardware and kernel driver to the container runtime and toolkit—is functioning correctly.

Running ls -la (Option B) or systemctl (Option A) only tests that the container can run, but it does nothing to verify GPU accessibility or driver communication.