Nixie: Efficient, Transparent Temporal Multiplexing for Consumer GPUs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xu, Yechen, Wang, Yifei, Ren, Nathanael, Chen, Yiran, Zhuo, Danyang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Xu, Yechen
Wang, Yifei
Ren, Nathanael
Chen, Yiran
Zhuo, Danyang
author_facet Xu, Yechen
Wang, Yifei
Ren, Nathanael
Chen, Yiran
Zhuo, Danyang
contents Consumer machines are increasingly running large ML workloads such as large language models (LLMs), text-to-image generation, and interactive image editing. Unlike datacenter GPUs, consumer GPUs serve single-user, rapidly changing workloads, and each model's working set often nearly fills the GPU memory. As a result, existing sharing mechanisms (e.g., NVIDIA Unified Virtual Memory) perform poorly due to memory thrashing and excessive use of CPU pinned memory when multiple applications are active. We design and implement Nixie, a system that enables efficient and transparent temporal multiplexing on consumer GPUs without requiring any application or driver changes. Nixie is a system service that coordinates GPU memory allocation and kernel launch behavior to efficiently utilize the CPU-GPU bi-directional bandwidth and CPU pinned memory. A lightweight scheduler in Nixie further improves responsiveness by automatically prioritizing latency-sensitive interactive jobs using MLFQ-inspired techniques. Our evaluations show that Nixie improves latency of real interactive code-completion tasks by up to $3.8\times$ and saves up to 66.8% CPU pinned memory usage given the same latency requirement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_11743
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Nixie: Efficient, Transparent Temporal Multiplexing for Consumer GPUs
Xu, Yechen
Wang, Yifei
Ren, Nathanael
Chen, Yiran
Zhuo, Danyang
Operating Systems
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Consumer machines are increasingly running large ML workloads such as large language models (LLMs), text-to-image generation, and interactive image editing. Unlike datacenter GPUs, consumer GPUs serve single-user, rapidly changing workloads, and each model's working set often nearly fills the GPU memory. As a result, existing sharing mechanisms (e.g., NVIDIA Unified Virtual Memory) perform poorly due to memory thrashing and excessive use of CPU pinned memory when multiple applications are active. We design and implement Nixie, a system that enables efficient and transparent temporal multiplexing on consumer GPUs without requiring any application or driver changes. Nixie is a system service that coordinates GPU memory allocation and kernel launch behavior to efficiently utilize the CPU-GPU bi-directional bandwidth and CPU pinned memory. A lightweight scheduler in Nixie further improves responsiveness by automatically prioritizing latency-sensitive interactive jobs using MLFQ-inspired techniques. Our evaluations show that Nixie improves latency of real interactive code-completion tasks by up to $3.8\times$ and saves up to 66.8% CPU pinned memory usage given the same latency requirement.
title Nixie: Efficient, Transparent Temporal Multiplexing for Consumer GPUs
topic Operating Systems
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11743