'I paid for the whole GPU, I am going to use the whole GPU'

Typical attire of a GPU utilization maximizer. Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs, are the hottest mathematical co-processor since the FM synthesis chips that shaped the sounds of the 1990s . Like all co-processors, they are chosen when the performance of more flexible commodity hardware, like an x86 Central Processing Unit (CPU), is insufficient. GPUs are in particular designed for problems where CPUs cannot achieve the desired throughput of mathematical operations (in particular, matrix multiplications). But GPUs are not cheap: high performance can command a high price. Combined together, the high price, performance sensitivity, and throughput-orientation of GPU applications mean that a large number of engineers and technical leaders find themselves concerned with GPU utilization of some form or another — “we’re paying a lot, so we’d better be using what we’re paying for”. At Modal, we have our own GPU utilization challenges to solve and we help our users solve theirs. We’ve not ... Read full article.