Guaranteeing Quality-of-Service (QoS) of latency-sensitive applications while improving server utilization through application co-location is important yet challenging in modern datacenters. The key challenge is that when applications are co-located on a server, performance interference due to resource contention can be detrimental to the application QoS. Although prior work has proposed techniques to identify "safe" co-locations where application QoS is satisfied by predicting the performance interference on multicores, no such prediction technique on accelerators such as GPUs. In this work, we present Prophet, an approach to precisely predict the performance degradation of latency-sensitive applications on accelerators due to application co-location. We analyzed the performance interference on accelerators through a real system investigation and found that unlike on multicores where the key contentious resources are shared caches and main memory bandwidth, the key contentious resources on accelerators are instead processing elements, accelerator memory bandwidth and PCIe bandwidth. Based on this observation, we designed interference models that enable the precise prediction for processing element, accelerator memory bandwidth and PCIe bandwidth contention on real hardware. By using a novel technique to forecast solo-run execution traces of the co-located applications using interference models, Prophet can accurately predict the performance degradation of latency-sensitive applications on non-preemptive accelerators. Using Prophet, we can identify "safe" co-locations on accelerators to improve utilization without violating the QoS target. Our evaluation shows that Prophet can predict the performance degradation with an average prediction error 5.47% on real systems. Meanwhile, based on the prediction, Prophet achieves accelerator utilization improvements of 49.9% on average while maintaining the QoS target of latency-sensitive applications.

@inproceedings{ChenYGKMT17,
  title = {Prophet},
  author = {Quan Chen and Hailong Yang and Minyi Guo and Ram Srivatsa Kannan and Jason Mars and Lingjia Tang},
  booktitle = {ASPLOS},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.1145/3037697.3037700}
}