Export the batch prediction job outputs from Cloud Storage and import them into BigQuery.

Answer: B

Explanation:

Reasoning: The question asks for a design that serves asynchronous predictions to determine whether a machine part will fail. This means that the predictions do not need to be returned immediately to the sensors, but can be processed in batches and sent to a downstream system for monitoring.

Option B is the only one that uses a streaming data pipeline with Pub/Sub and Dataflow, which can handle real-time data ingestion, processing, and prediction.

Option B also invokes the model for prediction, which is required by the question. The other options either use synchronous predictions (option A), batch predictions (options C and D), or do not invoke the model for prediction (option D).

Reference: You can learn more about the differences between synchronous, asynchronous, and batch predictions in Vertex AI from this document. You can also find examples of how to use Pub/Sub and Dataflow for streaming data pipelines from this tutorial and this codelab.