GaaS workload characterization under NUMA architecture for virtualized GPU

Huixiang Chen, Meng Wang, Yang Hu, Mingcong Song, Tao Li

Abstract: Graphics-as-a-service (GaaS) is gaining popularity in cloud computing community. There is an emerging trend of running GaaS workload using virtualized GPU in current data center deployment. This paper provides a detailed characterization of GaaS workload under virtualized GPU NUMA environment, and found that: (1) GaaS workloads exhibit different behavior with GPGPU workloads by having more frequent real-time data exchange between CPU and GPU; (2) GaaS workloads have no NUMA overhead, whether considering the influence of remote memory access or the resource contention of CPU uncore. We also test the performance and power tradeoff among the frequency scaling of CPU clock, GPU core clock, and GPU memory clock. Characterization results show that (1) ondemand CPU frequency scaling achieves the best balance between performance and power consumption; (2) GaaS workloads are GPU-computation intensive. GPU memory frequency can be set lower to save energy with little performance sacrifice.