Plenty of Room in the Middle: Revealing Opportunities on a GPU Cluster via Fine-Grained Monitoring

Abstract

GPU clusters have become essential computing resources for AI and scientific research in academia and industry. However, their high cost and growing demand often result in long queueing delays. While previous monitoring efforts have operated at second- or minute-level frequencies, they primarily informed job-level scheduling for clusters and lacked the detail needed to optimize GPU-level utilization. This paper presents an in-depth study of a university research GPU cluster, analyzing resource usage at 100 ms intervals. We have developed a lightweight monitoring tool that leverages Nvidia's DCGM library to capture fine-grained"compute utilization"metrics within GPUs. Deployed on a cluster with 89 nodes and 319 GPUs, our tool collected data over several months. This paper focuses on a 10-day period with 7,399 jobs submitted by 150 users from 12 departments. Our study reveals three key findings: (1) the GPU cluster exhibits significant underutilization, with over 70% of jobs using less than 20% of GPU memory and 50% averaging below 5% Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) utilization; (2) 80% of jobs have a drastic mismatch between their requested and actual durations, significantly limiting the scheduler's effectiveness; and (3) the multi-GPU jobs we examined show highly periodic communication patterns. These findings suggest there is plenty of room in the middle: substantial utilization gains are available through better job scheduling and GPU multitasking, independent of hardware or application improvements. Our monitoring solution is available as open-source software at https://github.com/als244/gpu_server_monitoring.