Performance and Power Prediction for Concurrent Execution on GPUs

Abstract

The unprecedented growth of edge computing and 5G has led to an increased offloading of mobile applications to cloud servers or edge cloudlets. 1 The most prominent workloads comprise computer vision applications. Conventional wisdom suggests that computer vision workloads perform significantly well on SIMD/SIMT architectures such as GPUs owing to the dominance of linear algebra kernels in their composition. In this work, we debunk this popular belief by performing a lot of experiments with the concurrent execution of these workloads, which is the most popular pattern in which these workloads are executed on cloud servers. We show that the performance of these applications on GPUs does not scale well with an increase in the number of concurrent applications primarily because of contention at the shared resources and lack of efficient virtualization techniques for GPUs. Hence, there is a need to accurately predict the performance and power of such ensemble workloads on a GPU. Sadly, most of the prior work in the area of performance/power prediction is for only a single application. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first machine learning-based predictor to predict the performance and power of an ensemble of applications on a GPU. In this article, we show that by using the execution statistics of stand-alone workloads and the fairness of execution when these workloads are executed with three representative microbenchmarks, we can get a reasonably accurate prediction. This is the first such work in the direction of performance and power prediction for concurrent applications that does not rely on the features extracted from concurrent executions or GPU profiling data. Our predictors achieve an accuracy of 91% and 96% in estimating the performance and power of executing two applications concurrently, respectively. We also demonstrate a method to extend our models to four or five concurrently running applications on modern GPUs.