Towards Fully-fledged GPU Multitasking via Proactive Memory Scheduling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shen, Weihang, Chen, Yinqiu, Chen, Rong, Chen, Haibo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shen, Weihang
Chen, Yinqiu
Chen, Rong
Chen, Haibo
author_facet Shen, Weihang
Chen, Yinqiu
Chen, Rong
Chen, Haibo
contents The limited HBM capacity has become the primary bottleneck for hosting an increasing number of larger-scale GPU tasks. While demand paging extends capacity via host DRAM, it incurs up to 78x slowdown due to the massive working sets and poor locality of GPU workloads. We observe, however, that GPU memory access patterns are inherently predictable via kernel launch arguments and their asynchronous execution nature. Leveraging this, we propose MSched, an OS-level scheduler that extends GPU context switching to include proactive working set preparation, thereby coalescing fragmented, eventual, and expensive page faults into a single efficient migration. MSched employs a template-based approach to predict working sets with near-perfect accuracy and proposes a co-design between task scheduler and memory manager to enforce a globally optimal page placement policy. Evaluation demonstrates that MSched outperforms demand paging by up to 11.05x for scientific and deep learning workloads, and 57.88x for LLM under memory oversubscription.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_24637
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Fully-fledged GPU Multitasking via Proactive Memory Scheduling
Shen, Weihang
Chen, Yinqiu
Chen, Rong
Chen, Haibo
Operating Systems
The limited HBM capacity has become the primary bottleneck for hosting an increasing number of larger-scale GPU tasks. While demand paging extends capacity via host DRAM, it incurs up to 78x slowdown due to the massive working sets and poor locality of GPU workloads. We observe, however, that GPU memory access patterns are inherently predictable via kernel launch arguments and their asynchronous execution nature. Leveraging this, we propose MSched, an OS-level scheduler that extends GPU context switching to include proactive working set preparation, thereby coalescing fragmented, eventual, and expensive page faults into a single efficient migration. MSched employs a template-based approach to predict working sets with near-perfect accuracy and proposes a co-design between task scheduler and memory manager to enforce a globally optimal page placement policy. Evaluation demonstrates that MSched outperforms demand paging by up to 11.05x for scientific and deep learning workloads, and 57.88x for LLM under memory oversubscription.
title Towards Fully-fledged GPU Multitasking via Proactive Memory Scheduling
topic Operating Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24637