Plenty of Room in the Middle: Revealing Opportunities on a GPU Cluster via Fine-Grained Monitoring

arXiv:2610.36329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: GPU clusters have become essential computing resources for AI and scientific research in academia and industry. However, their high cost and growing demand often result in long queueing delays. While previous monitoring efforts have operated at second- or minute-level frequencies, they primarily informed job-level scheduling for clusters and lacked the detail needed to optimize GPU-level utilization. This paper presents an in-depth study of a university research GPU cluster, analyzing resource usage at 100 ms intervals. We have developed a lightweight monitoring tool that leverages Nvidia's DCGM library to capture fine-grained "compute utilization" metrics within GPUs.