Energy-Efficient SLA Guarantees for Virtualized GPU in Cloud Gaming

Both power consumption and SLA guarantees are important concerns for cloud gaming. Recently, various approaches have been developed to effectively reduce GPU power consumption by making GPU run at low frequencies. However, virtual machines (VMs) running on the same physical GPU with virtualization technology are correlated, because the change of GPU frequencies will affect the SLA performance of all the VMs. In fact, both reducing power consumption and guaranteeing SLA should work together under the considerations of their correlations. This paper proposes a novel two-layer control architecture called energy-efficient SLA guarantees for virtualized GPU (EvGPU) based on well-established feedback control techniques. The first control loop adopts a proportional-integral (PI) controller to ensure SLA guarantees, which in particular are measured at a predefined level of the frames per second (FPS) for each online game. The secondary power control loop then adjusts GPU frequency through dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS) to reduce power consumption based on the current FPS achieved by the first loop. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed solution can effectively reduce GPU power consumption, while achieving the required SLA performance in virtualized GPU for cloud gaming.