Organizations: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA · Application Performance Group (NERSC), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA · Advanced Technologies Group (NERSC), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA · Data & AI Sciences Group (NERSC), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA
Efficient utilization of GPU resources and power has become critical with the growing demand for GPUs in high-performance computing (HPC). In this paper, we analyze GPU utilization and GPU memory utilization, as well as the power consumption of the Vienna ab initio Simulation Package (VASP), using the Slurm workload manager historical logs and GPU performance metrics collected by NVIDIA's Data Center GPU Manager (DCGM). VASP is a widely used materials science application on Perlmutter at NERSC, an HPE Cray EX system based on NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Using our insights from the resource utilization analysis of VASP applications, we propose a resource prediction framework to predict the average GPU power, maximum GPU utilization, and maximum GPU memory utilization values of heterogeneous HPC system applications to enable more efficient scheduling decisions and power-aware system operation. Our prediction framework consists of two stages: 1) using only the Slurm accounting logs as training data and 2) augmenting the training data with historical GPU profiling metrics collected with DCGM. The maximum GPU utilization predictions using only the Slurm submission features achieve up to 97% accuracy. Furthermore, features engineered from GPU-compute and memory activity metrics exhibit good correlations with average power utilization, and our runtime power usage prediction experiments result in up to 92% prediction accuracy. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of DCGM metrics in capturing application characteristics and highlight their potential for developing predictive models to support dynamic power management in HPC systems.
Figures & tables
Feature
Description
User
Name of the user submitting the job.
JobName
User selected job name.
Account
User’s account to charge for computing.
Category
Scientific category the user belongs to.
ReqCPUs
Number of CPUs requested.
ReqNode
Number of GPU nodes requested.
TABLE I: Selected Slurm job accounting fields.
Metric
Description
gpu_utilization
GPU utilization activity (%).
fb_used
Used frame buffer memory (MB).
fb_free
Free frame buffer memory (MB).
sm_active
The ratio of cycles where an SM has at least 1 active warp.
sm_occupancy
The ratio of the number of warps resident on an SM, relative to the theoretical maximum number of active warps.
dram_active
The ratio of cycles with active device memory; sending or receiving data.
TABLE II: Selected GPU profiling metrics from NVIDIA DCGM.
Fig. 1: Distributions of maximum GPU utilization, maximum memory utilization, and average power for VASP GPU jobs on Perlmutter (March 2025).
Fig. 2: Overview of the proposed two-stage framework for GPU resource and power prediction.
Target Variable
Sym. Acc ( ↑ )
MAE ( ↓ )
R2 ( ↑ )
Max. GPU Utilization
0.97
2.39%
0.59
Max. Memory Utilization
0.88
2.58%
0.70
Average Power
0.94
8.57W
0.84
TABLE III: First-Stage Prediction Performance for VASP Jobs
Fig. 3: Before job execution prediction: Normalized feature importance scores from the LightGBM regression models for each target variable.
Fig. 4: During job execution power prediction: Normalized confusion matrices comparing baseline methods and the proposed framework.
Model
Acc ( ↑ )
F1 Score ( ↑ )
Max Baseline
0.63
0.62
Mean Baseline
0.63
0.62
Proposed Framework
0.82
0.80
TABLE IV: Runtime Power Prediction Performance for VASP Jobs
Fig. 5: Test samples from a 10-minute VASP job execution window, showing runtime predictions of average power consumption class.
Fig. 6: During job execution prediction: Normalized feature importance scores from the LightGBM classifier.
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, C. de los Ciruelos, 28660 Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain · Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Gertrudstrasse 15, 8400 Winterthur, Switzerland