arXiv Machine Learning

A principled approach for energy-efficient training via phase-aware GPU frequency tuning

arXiv AI
Oct 26

Power- and Fragmentation-aware Online Scheduling for GPU Datacenters

The paper introduces PWR, a scheduling policy that selects power‑efficient GPU and CPU combinations to reduce power consumption in GPU datacenters. It complements the existing Fragmentation Gradient Descent (FGD) policy, which mitigates GPU fragmentation by using a fragmentation metric. Experiments in a simulated cluster show that combining PWR with FGD balances power savings and fragmentation reduction.

By Francesco Lettich, Emanuele Carlini, Franco Maria Nardini, Raffaele Perego, Salvatore Trani
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

One Simple Trick for Improving the Performance of Energy-Limited Local Inference and Training

The paper proposes a simple technique of chunking workloads into smaller parts that alternate between compute-intensive and memory-bound operations to smooth power and temperature spikes in GPU systems. By doing so, it prevents throttling, leading to faster wall-clock times and lower total energy consumption. Experiments on a DGX Spark show up to 2% performance and energy gains, while similar benefits, though smaller, are observed on multi‑GPU servers.

By Erik Schultheis, Maximilian Kleinegger, Dan Alistarh
arXiv AI
Oct 31

The Illusion of Power Capping in LLM Decode: A Phase-Aware Energy Characterisation Across Attention Architectures

The paper investigates the effectiveness of GPU power capping during large language model (LLM) autoregressive decoding. It finds that power caps have minimal impact on decoding performance because decode kernels are memory‑bound and the GPU idles between launches, drawing less than half its 700 W rating. By instead locking the SM clock, the authors can reduce power consumption by up to 32 % with negligible throughput loss and identify three architecture‑dependent frequency‑scaling classes that influence energy use.

By Bole Ma, Ayesha Afzal, Jan Eitzinger, Gerhard Wellein
arXiv AI
Oct 31

LLM-PowerTrace: A Dataset of Time-Resolved GPU Power Traces for AI Compute

LLM-PowerTrace is an open dataset that provides time‑resolved, per‑GPU power traces for large language model fine‑tuning and inference. The traces are sampled every 100 ms across various NVIDIA platforms and include detailed workload and system metadata. The dataset covers a wide range of model families, sizes, and controlled sweeps over batch size, sequence length, precision, parallelism, checkpointing, concurrency, GPU frequency, KV‑cache and weight quantization, prompt and output lengths, and request‑arrival patterns, and it defines power‑grid‑facing metrics and an AI‑compute power & energy scaling law.

By Jiansheng Wang, Jaskeerat Singh, Haochen Xu, Xinyi Li, Mingyuan Yan, Shaohui Liu, Yuzhuo Li, Yize Chen, Wenqi Cui
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Data Driven Optimization of GPU efficiency for Distributed LLM-Adapter Serving

arXiv:2602. 24044v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) adapters enable low-cost model specialization, but introduce complex caching and scheduling challenges in distributed serving systems where hundreds of adapters must be hosted concurrently.

By Ferran Agullo, Joan Oliveras, Chen Wang, Alberto Gutierrez-Torre, Olivier Tardieu, Alaa Youssef, Jordi Torres, Josep Ll. Berral
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 11

CARB: A Characterization-Guided Framework for CNN Inference Cost Prediction and Deployment Screening

Accurate pre-deployment estimation of CNN inference cost--energy, latency, and peak memory--is increasingly critical as models are deployed on resource-constrained GPU platforms. Existing approaches rely on FLOPs, latency measurements, or single-device profiling as energy proxies, overlooking the non-linear interactions between architectural design and hardware load.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Understanding the Energy Scaling of Large Language Model Inference Across Context Lengths and Attention Architectures

The paper systematically studies decode‑phase energy consumption of open‑source large language models using different attention architectures—Multi‑Head Attention (MHA), Grouped Query Attention (GQA), and GQA with Sliding Window Attention (SWA). It evaluates four models across varying context lengths, batch sizes, and generation workloads, measuring GPU energy via NVIDIA counters. Findings show that the attention mechanism is the main driver of how energy scales with context length, with MHA models growing steeply, GQA models growing less, and GQA+SWA remaining nearly constant; model size mainly sets absolute energy use, while batching can cut energy per token and latency by up to 87%.

By Molka Chkir, Syed Muhammad Danish, Jos H\"oll, Arghavan Asad