CARMA: Collocation-Aware Resource Manager

Ehsan Yousefzadeh-Asl-Miandoab; Florina M. Ciorba; Pınar Tözün

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arXiv · 2508.19073

CARMA: Collocation-Aware Resource Manager

Ehsan Yousefzadeh-Asl-Miandoab·Florina M. Ciorba·Pınar Tözün

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Abstract

GPUs running deep learning (DL) workloads are frequently underutilized. Collocating multiple DL training tasks on the same GPU can improve utilization but introduces two key risks: (1) out-of-memory (OOM) crashes for newly scheduled tasks, and (2) severe performance interference among co-running tasks, which can negate any throughput gains. These issues reduce system robustness, quality of service, and energy efficiency. We present CARMA, a task-level, collocation-aware resource manager for the server-scale. CARMA addresses collocation challenges via (1) fine-grained monitoring and bookkeeping of GPUs and a collocation risk analysis that filters out the high-risk GPUs; (2) task placement policies that cap GPU utilization to limit OOMs and interference; (3) integration of GPU memory need estimators for DL tasks to minimize OOMs during collocation; and (4) a lightweight recovery method that relaunches jobs crashed due to OOMs. Our evaluation on a DL training workload derived from real-world traces shows that CARMA uses GPUs more efficiently by making more informed collocation decisions: for the best-performing collocation policy, CARMA increases GPU streaming multiprocessor (SM) utilization by 54%, the parallelism achieved per SM by 61%, and memory use by 62%. This results in a ~35% and ~15% reduction in the end-to-end execution time (makespan) and GPU energy consumption, respectively, for this workload.

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BibTeX RIS

Ehsan Yousefzadeh-Asl-Miandoab, Florina M. Ciorba, Pınar Tözün. 2026-02-23. CARMA: Collocation-Aware Resource Manager. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19073

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