Traditional end-host network stacks are struggling to keep up with rapidly increasing datacenter access link bandwidths due to their unsustainable CPU overheads. Motivated by this, our community is exploring a multitude of solutions for future network stacks: from Linux kernel optimizations to partial hardware offload to clean-slate userspace stacks to specialized host network hardware. The design space explored by these solutions would benefit from a detailed understanding of CPU inefficiencies in existing network stacks.

We present Gandivafair, a distributed, fair share scheduler that balances conflicting goals of efficiency and fairness in GPU clusters for deep learning training (DLT). Gandivafair provides performance isolation between users, enabling multiple users to share a single cluster, thus, maximizing cluster efficiency. Gandivafair is the first scheduler that allocates cluster-wide GPU time fairly among active users.