Model-Free GPU Online Energy Optimization

GPUs play a central and indispensable role as accelerators in modern high-performance computing (HPC) platforms, enabling a wide range of tasks to be performed efficiently. However, the use of GPUs also results in significant energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. This article presents MF-GPOEO, a model-free GPU online energy efficiency optimization framework. MF-GPOEO leverages a synthetic performance index and a PID controller to dynamically determine the optimal clock frequency configuration for GPUs. It profiles GPU kernel activity information under different frequency configurations and then compares GPU kernel execution time and gap duration between kernels to derive the synthetic performance index. With the performance index and measured average power, MF-GPOEO can use the PID controller to try different frequency configurations and find the optimal frequency configuration under the guidance of user-defined objective functions. We evaluate the MF-GPOEO by running it with 74 applications on an NVIDIA RTX3080Ti GPU. MF-GPOEO delivers a mean energy saving of 26.2% with a slight average execution time increase of 3.4% compared with NVIDIA's default clock scheduling strategy.