AutoSched: An Adaptive Self-configured Framework for Scheduling Deep Learning Training Workloads

AutoSched: An Adaptive Self-configured Framework for

Scheduling Deep Learning Training Workloads

Wei Gao

gaow0007@e.ntu.edu.sg

S-Lab, Nanyang Technological

University

Singapore

Xu Zhang

xuzhang@cqu.edu.cn

Chongqing University

China

Shan Huang

shuang036@e.ntu.edu.sg

Nanyang Technological University

Singapore

Shangwei Guo

swguo@cqu.edu.cn

Chongqing University

China

Peng Sun

sunpeng1@sensetime.com

Sensetime & Shanghai AI Lab

China

Yonggang Wen

ygwen@ntu.edu.sg

Nanyang Technological University

Singapore

Tianwei Zhang

tianwei.zhang@ntu.edu.sg

Nanyang Technological University

Singapore

ABSTRACT

Modern Deep Learning Training (DLT) schedulers in GPU datacen-

ters are designed to be very sophisticated with many configurations.

These configurations need to be adjusted delicately as they can sig-

nificantly affect the scheduling performance. Existing schedulers

require the datacenter operator to tune the configurations only

once before they are deployed, based on the historical workload

traces. Unfortunately, workloads in a datacenter would experience

dynamic changes and deviate a lot from the historical ones over

time, making the pre-determined configurations less effective.

To address this dilemma, we design AutoSched, a framework

that can automatically, efficiently, and dynamically adjust the con-

figuration parameters of DLT schedulers. Motivated by our charac-

terization analysis of real-world DLT workloads and existing sched-

ulers, we introduce two innovative system designs. (1) We develop

a Generation Engine to produce workloads that can reveal the future

trace pattern, which facilitates accurate configuration tuning. (2)

We design a Search Engine to reduce the exorbitant overhead of con-

figuration tuning. AutoSched is general and can be integrated with

off-the-shelf schedulers. We showcase how AutoSched strengthens

three representative DLT schedulers and evaluate them on varying

DLT traces. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoSched

improves the performance of state-of-the-art schedulers by up to

46% with 132× configuration tuning latency reduction.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International

4.0 License.

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0610-3/24/06

https://doi.org/10.1145/3650200.3656598

CCS CONCEPTS

• Computing methodologies →Distributed computing method-

ologies.

KEYWORDS

Deep Learning Training, Cluster Management System

ACM Reference Format:

Wei Gao, Xu Zhang, Shan Huang, Shangwei Guo, Peng Sun, Yonggang

Wen, and Tianwei Zhang. 2024. AutoSched: An Adaptive Self-configured

Framework for Scheduling Deep Learning Training Workloads. In Pro-

ceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS

’24), June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3650200.3656598

INTRODUCTION

The widespread adoption of deep learning (DL) technology has

motivated many IT companies to build datacenters with GPUs to

handle the high demands for DL training (DLT) workloads. In such a

large GPU datacenter, a scheduler is required to manage these work-

loads and allocate computing resources to them. Over the years,

a variety of scheduling systems have been proposed to achieve

different performance objectives, e.g., latency reduction [16, 21, 32],

fairness [10, 43, 46], resource utilization improvement [42]. DLT

schedulers typically feature a multitude of configuration param-

eters, exerting a substantial impact on their performance. For in-

stance, KubeFlow [25], a production-level DLT scheduler, exposes

parameters metric and target to help autoscale GPU resources

for cost-effectiveness. Bad parameter values of these critical config-

urations might fail to scale up resources [1, 2].

Now it is a common practice for a datacenter operator to stati-

cally pre-determine the optimal configuration parameters for his

DLT scheduler and then deploy it in production. However, the dat-

acenter environment (e.g., resource utilization, job load) changes

significantly over time [12, 14, 18, 41] (as shown in Figure 1), and

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

Wei Gao, Xu Zhang, Shan Huang, Shangwei Guo, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, and Tianwei Zhang

Hours

Cluster Util.(%)

(a) Cluster Utilization

Hours

Requests (5 Min.)

(b) Workload Submission

Figure 1: Changing (a) cluster utilization and (b) workload

submission pattern of Helios trace [18] in one day.

fixed configuration parameters would result in poor scheduling per-

formance. Therefore, it is crucial to have an efficient system, that

dynamically and automatically tunes the scheduling configuration

parameters, to adapt to the environment changes. This is missing in

today’s GPU datacenter design or development.

To achieve such an adaptive configuration, there are generally

two strategies. (1) The cluster operator can manually adjust the

configuration parameters at regular time intervals. This has been

realized in conventional software systems [20, 37, 38]. In a large-

scale GPU datacenter, reconfiguring the DLT scheduler each time

involves tuning a substantial number of parameters, which requires

great expertise and effort. Moreover, an improper parameter value

can lead to a considerable performance decline. (2) Recent research

including SelfTune [24] and Oppertune [35] proposes to adopt ma-

chine learning (ML) models to automate the configuration tuning

for conventional datacenter schedulers. Although these automated

methods ease the burden of datacenter operators, they exhibit two

key limitations when applied to DLT schedulers. First, they per-

form configuration tuning on obsolete workload traces that are

normally minutes long at most. In contrast, the duration of a DLT

workload can be up to dozens of days, which introduces delays in

the trace acquisition. The obsolete traces thus misguide the con-

figuration tuning, leading to inefficient configuration parameters.

Second, these methods necessitate multiple rounds of configuration

sampling to assess the performance objectives. A DLT scheduler

typically has an expansive configuration parameter space, which

demands more sampling rounds to identify the optimal results with

unacceptable overhead. The long duration of DLT workloads brings

longer performance measurement time, further exacerbating the

tuning overhead.

We propose AutoSched, a framework that adaptively self-tunes

the configurations of off-the-shelf DLT schedulers in large-scale

GPU datacenters, to achieve near-optimal scheduling performance.

AutoSched consists of two innovative system designs to address

the above-mentioned limitations. First, to handle the obsolete trace

issue, we introduce a Generation Engine to craft more realistic future

workloads. In Section 2.1, we show that a DLT workload trace can be

decomposed into a periodic and bursty component. Therefore, our

Generation Engine comprises a global generator and local predictor

to handle these two components separately. For periodic workload

submissions, the global generator searches for the best match from

historical traces as future-arrival workloads. For bursty workload

submissions, the local predictor reacts by estimating the duration of

existing-unfinished workloads at the time of trace collection at reg-

ular intervals. We combine existing-unfinished and future-arrival

workloads to unveil the future time-resource dynamics of the GPU

datacenter for subsequent configuration tuning.

Second, to handle the tuning overhead issue, we design a Search

Controller with three innovative techniques. (1) Instead of running

DLT workloads on actual GPUs with high cost, we implement

a trace simulator to efficiently approximate the performance ob-

jectives with specified configuration parameters. Thus, the entire

configuration tuning process does not require actual GPU resources.

(2) We develop a causal tuner to early terminate unnecessary perfor-

mance measurements with poor configuration parameters. (3) We

further design a trace aggregator to group similar workloads, which

significantly reduces the number of workloads under evaluation

without compromising the tuning performance.

AutoSched can be directly integrated with existing DLT sched-

ulers. We evaluate it on three representative systems: Tiresias [16],

Themis [28], and Lucid [19]. Our evaluation encompasses three

production-level DLT workload traces: Philly [23], Helios [18], and

PAI [41]. Compared with state-of-the-art self-configured method

SelfTune [24], AutoSched expedite the job completion time (JCT)

by up to 1.36× and 1.46 × for Tiresias and Lucid respectively, and

promotes the fairness by 1.12× for Themis across various workload

traces. Additionally, AutoSched accelerates configuration tuning

up to 132×. Our contributions are summarized as follows:

• We uncover the importance of dynamic configuration tuning

in optimizing DLT schedulers, and design the first adaptive

self-configured framework to fill this gap.

• We design the Generation Engine to produce DLT traces for

efficient configuration tuning of DLT schedulers.

• We design the Search Controller with trace simulator, causal

tuner and trace aggregator to reduce the tuning overhead.

• We show the superiority of AutoSched on three representative

DLT schedulers with a variety of DLT traces.

BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION

2.1

Characterization of DLT Workloads

We perform DLT workload trace analysis to unveil their unique

characteristics, which guide us to design AutoSched.

Long Execution. Figure 2(a) presents the cumulative density func-

tions (CDFs) for the job duration distributions from different large-

scale GPU datanceters, including Microsoft (Philly), SenseTime

(Helios) and Alibaba Cloud (PAI). We observe that the job duration

in these traces varies widely, ranging from seconds to dozens of

days. The prolonged use of GPU resources could contribute to a

delay in obtaining accurate DLT traces for configuration tuning.

High Resource Demand. A DLT job could request up to thousands

of GPUs [18, 23, 41]. Such intensive resource demands account for

a significant portion of GPU datacenter capacity. Moreover, these

jobs with high GPU demands usually have long execution time.

We introduce a metric service, which is denoted as the product

of the requested number of GPUs and execution time. Figure 2(b)

illustrates the distribution of the service with different numbers of

requested GPUs in Helios using the violin plot. The peak/median

service usage presents a growing trend with increased requested

GPUs. This phenomenon is also observed in Philly and PAI. The

elevated service usage of individual DLT workloads may lead to a

resource shortage in the GPU datacenter.

AutoSched: An Adaptive Self-configured Framework for Scheduling Deep Learning Training Workloads

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

10⁰

10²

10⁴

10⁶

Duration (Seconds)

0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00

CDF

Philly

Helios

PAI

(a) Job duration

GPU Request

10¹

10³

10⁵

10⁷

Service (GPU-Sec)

(b) GPU request vs. GPU service

Day

Request Per Hour

Periodic

Bursty

10⁰

10¹

10²

10³

10⁴

Task Recurrence

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

CDF

(d) Recurrence

Figure 2: Characterization of DLT workloads. (a) CDF (𝑦-axis) of the job duration (𝑥-axis) in different traces; (b) Violin plots of

the service (𝑦-axis) over different GPU requests (𝑥-axis) in Helios; (c) Periodic and bursty arrival (number of requests per hour,

𝑦-axis) in Helios over time (𝑥-axis); (d) CDF (𝑦-axis) of the task recurrence (𝑥-axis).

Table 1: The primary configurations of mainstream DLT schedulers in different modules.

Scheduler

Tiresias [16]

Themis [28]

Astrenea [43]

Gavel [30]

Chronus [14]

Lucid [19]

Admission

N/A

profiler capacity

Scheduling

queue, priority

lease term

queue, lease term

lease term

priority

Placement

pack limit

threshold

N/A

threshold

Admission

Module

Job

Submitted

Waiting Queue

Workload

Module

Round

Placement

Module

Scheduling

Module

job

Figure 3: The common workflow of existing DLT schedulers.

queue

thr

queue

starve

limit

pack

limit

priority

(a) Configuration Dependency

Week

JCT Ratio btw.

Fixed and Adaptive

1.2^1.6

3.8

1.2

2.9

1.0

1.6

1.1^1.4

1.8

1.1

1.8^1.8

(b) Fixed v.s. Historical Adaptive.

Week

1.0

1.5

2.0

JCT Ratio btw.

Historical and Futurist

1.2^1.31.3

1.11.1

1.0

1.21.1^1.2

1.4

1.0

1.3^1.3

Configuration Search Iteration

200

250

300

350

Latency (s)

(d) Configuration search overhead

Figure 4: Configuration analysis: (a) The dependency of pa-

rameters in Tiresias; (b) The scheduling performance compar-

ison between fixed and adaptive schedulers. (c) The negative

impact of obsolete traces. (d) The high configuration search

overhead.

Periodic and Bursty Job Submissions. A DLT trace exhibits

both periodic and bursty job submission patterns. To demonstrate

this, we analyze the Helios trace of seven days in Figure 2(c). We

utilize the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to extract the periodic

submission patterns (top). The estimated period is roughly 23 hours,

reflecting the users’ repeated daily behaviors. We also obtain the

bursty submission patterns by subtracting the periodic job requests

from the original ones (bottom). We observe a datacenter may also

experience busty job submissions in unpredictable moments.

Recurrence. Numerous DLT trace analysis [12, 18, 26, 41] reveal a

recurrent pattern in job submissions. We denote task recurrence as

the number of jobs that share the same task semantics, e.g., training

for the same model. The PAI trace contains fine-grained user and

programming information, allowing us to identify recurring DLT

workloads. Figure 2(d) presents the CDF of task recurrence on the

PAI trace. We observe that approximately 60% of jobs repeat more

than ten times in the trace. Other DLT trace analyses [18, 23] also

confirm the prevalence of such workloads. The recurring DLT work-

loads primarily arise from hyper-parameter tuning and debugging

purposes [12, 41, 42], and they often have similar job duration and

resource usage. This provides opportunities to predict the charac-

teristics of future workloads, facilitating the configuration tuning

design (Sections 3.2.2 and 3.3.2).

2.2

DLT Scheduler

Workflow. Inspired by previous work [4], we analyze the typical

workflow of existing DLT schedulers as illustrated in Figure 3. A

DLT scheduler normally adopts a round-based policy, wherein re-

source allocations are adjusted at fixed intervals. It contains four

key modules. First, the Admission Module analyzes and validates the

newly-submitted jobs, and forwards the qualified jobs to the wait-

ing queue. Second, the Scheduling Module determines the resource

allocations for the workloads to be scheduled in each round. Third,

the Placement Module assigns GPU resources to each workload that

gets scheduled. Fourth, the Workload Module monitors necessary

performance metrics (e.g., preemption overhead, throughput), pos-

sibly preempts running workloads for incoming ones, and adjusts

resource allocations. Such modularized design not only facilitates

the analysis of configurations but also enables the generalization

of our findings to new DLT schedulers.

Configurations. We analyze some key configurations of main-

stream DLT schedulers designed for large-scale GPU datacenters

in Table 1. Many schedulers share similar types of configurations

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

Wei Gao, Xu Zhang, Shan Huang, Shangwei Guo, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, and Tianwei Zhang

across these modules. We summarize three features of these config-

urations. First, a DLT scheduler usually incorporates a hybrid of

numerical (e.g., pack limit) and categorical (e.g., priority) config-

uration parameters, consequently increasing the complexity of con-

figuration tuning. Many configuration tuning algorithms [13, 39]

are solely designed for singular data types.

Second, the configurations of a DLT scheduler exhibit intricate

dependencies. Figure 4(a) shows the relationships among the con-

figurations of Tiresias. The value of queue determines how many

queue thrs are tuned simultaneously. The dependency poses a sig-

nificant barrier to tuning each configuration independently. Decou-

pling the configuration dependency would result in an exponential

increase in the configuration parameter space.

Third, many configurations of a DLT scheduler play a trade-off

role in workload scheduling. For example, profiler capacity is a

configurable parameter in the Admission Module. A large profiler

capacity might increase the reserved resources for workload profil-

ing, leading to low cluster GPU utilization and delayed execution of

workloads. A small profiler capacity might cause a long queu-

ing delay for newly-submitted workloads in the Admission Module.

Experienced operators can analyze the queuing delays and GPU

utilization to configure profiler capacity appropriately. Though

obscured by the performance objectives, the prevalent trade-off be-

comes apparent through the analysis of intermediate performance

metrics (e.g., cluster utilization and queuing delay). These metrics

serve as a scaffold, revealing the impact of each configuration on

specific intermediate performance aspects. Understanding this rela-

tionship enables optimized configuration tuning.

2.3

Existing Solutions for Configuration Tuning

We quantitatively discuss the limitations of existing solutions for

configuration tuning, using the Tiresias scheduler on the Helios

trace as an example.

Fixed Configuration. We first consider the fixed configuration

case. We conduct an exhaustive search for the optimal configura-

tion parameters on a sub-trace of one week and apply them for

future scheduling (“fixed”). Meanwhile, we also consider a “histor-

ical adaptive” case as a baseline, where we adaptively adjust the

configuration every hour by searching for the optimal parameters

from the previous hour. We use SelfTune [24], a state-of-the-art

adaptive configuration method, to search and adjust the config-

urations every hour. Figure 4(b) presents the average JCT ratio

between the fixed and historical adaptive cases across different

weeks. We observe that the maximum JCT with the fixed config-

uration could be as high as 3.8× than the historical adaptive one.

This underscores the inefficiency of fixed configurations for DLT

schedulers and leaves a substantial optimization space for adaptive

configuration tuning.

Adaptive Configuration. Next, we demonstrate the historical

adaptive configuration is still not the optimal strategy from two

perspectives. First, obsolete workload traces could mislead the adap-

tive configuration algorithm to yield sub-optimal scheduling per-

formance. To verify this, we choose the “futuristic adaptive” case

as the baseline, where we adjust the configurations every hour

based on the future workloads in this hour. Note that this baseline

represents the ideal solution, which cannot be achieved in practice.

Ø Config Space & Constraints

Ø Performance Objectives

Scheduler Controller

Generated

Workloads

Collected Workloads

Optimal Configs

Generation Engine

Search Controller

DL Scheduler: Tiresais, Themis, Lucid …

Reconfigure Scheduler

Cluster & Scheduler Status

Workload

Repository

Local

Predictor

Global

Generator

Causal

Tuner

Trace

Aggregator

Simulator

AutoSched

Figure 5: The online workflow of AutoSched. It contains two

key components: (1) The Generation Engine yields realistic

workload traces; (2) The Search Controller efficiently searches

the optimal configurations with the generated traces.

Figure 4(c) shows the JCT ratio between historical (SelfTune) and

futuristic adaptive solutions. The configurations from the historical

workloads in SelfTune can lead to a 1.4× JCT slowdown, indicating

that historical traces are not appropriate for configuration search.

Second, a DLT scheduler normally involves numerous configu-

ration parameters, and assessing the scheduling performance for

each set of parameters requires several minutes. Hence, existing

historical adaptive configuration methods suffer from high tuning

overhead. Figure 4(d) shows the configuration search latency at

each iteration using SelfTune. Here, each iteration indicates the

process of tuning configurations on an hour-length evaluated trace.

Despite its low sample complexity, SelfTune takes tens of minutes

to search for configuration parameters, even though it can achieve

efficient configurations in a few iterations.

FRAMEWORK DESIGN

We introduce AutoSched, an adaptive self-configured framework

for DLT schedulers. We begin with the overview of AutoSched,

followed by the detailed descriptions of two key components: Gen-

eration Engine and Search Controller.

3.1

Overview

AutoSched consists of an offline and online phase. In the offline

phase, the datacenter operator provides AutoSched with the config-

uration parameter space and constraints (i.e., configuration depen-

dency), as well as the desired performance objectives. AutoSched

utilizes the historical workloads to train a local predictor that can

estimate the duration of existing-unfinished workloads. Besides, the

datacenter operator defines the intermediate performance metrics

to help construct the causal performance predictor.

In the online phase, Figure 5 illustrates the runtime workflow of

AutoSched. The Generation Engine first uses the global generator

and local predictor to generate workloads for configuration tuning

(❶). The Search Controller adopts the trace simulator, causal tuner,

and trace aggregator to quickly tune configuration. It then identifies

the optimal configuration parameters and notifies the Scheduler

Controller (❷). The Scheduler Controller reconfigures the sched-

uler with the optimal configurations (❸). Besides, it continuously

AutoSched: An Adaptive Self-configured Framework for Scheduling Deep Learning Training Workloads

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

Configuration Search

Time

GPU Request

Finished

Workloads

Future

Workloads

Existing-Unfinished

Workloads

Future-Arrival

Workloads

Figure 6: Illustration of existing-unfinished and future-

arrival workloads in a datacenter.

monitors the datacenter and workload status (❹). The Scheduler

Controller streams the information to a workload repository that

follow prior trace studies [18, 23] to store historical workloads and

relevant attributes for the Generation Engine (❺). The implementa-

tion details of the Scheduler Controller are in Section 4.3. We detail

the design of the Generation Engine and Search Controller below.

3.2

Generation Engine

The Generation Engine aims to produce DLT workloads for configu-

ration tuning. As discussed in Section 2.3, historical DLT workloads

are insufficient to reveal future job load and GPU resource usage,

thus misguiding configuration tuning. To address this limitation,

the Generation Engine considers two scenarios of workloads: future-

arrival workloads and existing-unfinished workloads, as shown in

Figure 6. In particular, we employ a global generator to create future-

arrival workloads and a local predictor to estimate the duration of

existing-unfinished workloads at the time of trace generation.

3.2.1

Global Generator. The global generator leverages the peri-

odic job arrival pattern observed in DLT traces to generate future-

arrival workloads. While TraceGen [8] utilizes a generative machine

learning model to create realistic workloads, it requires millions of

historical workloads for training. In light of this, we choose a more

lightweight approach to generate future-arrival workloads.

In detail, we analyze the historical workloads in the workload

repository based on the number of requests per 5 minutes, and then

adopt FFT to extract the periodic workload submission. To generate

future-arrival workloads, we choose the trace from the past hour

(i.e., 12 points with each point representing the number of requests

per 5 minutes) as a reference segment. Subsequently, we search

the workload repository for the most similar trace, measuring the

similarity between the two trace segments using relative percentage

error. The identified trace is directly replicated and utilized as future-

arrival workloads.

Our global generator has two merits: (1) compared with directly

using historical workloads, the global generator takes advantage of

the periodic submission patterns of DLT workloads and generates

traces that can reveal the future workload submission density; (2)

compared with the ML-based trace generation approach [8], the

global generator is simple and transparent to datacenter opera-

tors. Our empirical studies in Section 5.2 demonstrate that we can

generate future-arrival workloads with high accuracy.

3.2.2

Local Predictor. This component is used to predict the dura-

tion of existing-unfinished workloads, which entails future usage

of GPU resources at the time of trace generation. Hence, it is crucial

to incorporate such information into the generated workloads for

configuration tuning. When confronted with bursts of submissions

at an unpredictable moment, AutoSched adopts the local predictor

to predict the duration, enabling prompt configuration tuning.

The design of the local predictor is underpinned by the recur-

rence pattern observed in DLT workload traces, as detailed in

Section 2.1. When training DL models, developers often prema-

turely stop the workload execution or oversubscribe the number

of training iterations required [18, 41]. Consequently, building a

performance model to accurately predict the job duration at scale

is impractical [18, 41]. Instead, the local predictor concentrates on

predicting the range of duration, which is a comparatively more

tractable problem.

We engineer relevant input features, as outlined in Table 2, to

facilitate the efficiency of the local predictor. Specifically, the local

predictor inputs the temporal features and GPU requests from re-

cent 𝑘arrival workloads, recent 𝑘finished workloads, and the query

workload. It classifies the duration of query workload into a small

number of ranges: [0,𝑡1), [𝑡1,𝑡2), ..., [𝑡𝑛, ∞). Prior works [12, 18]

adopt similar attributes to predict the job features for better sched-

uling performance. We choose the decision tree (DT) to predict the

job duration range because DT offers high accuracy with minimal

latency overhead (discussed in Section 5.2). With the job duration

range, the Search Controller samples a value from the historical

duration distribution that satisfies the predicted duration range,

and assigns such value as the predicted duration for this workload.

Table 2: The features used by the local predictor to predict

the job duration range.

Name

Features

Recent Arrivals

arrival time, execution time until now,

GPU request of recent 𝑘newly-submitted jobs

Recent Completions

arrival time, finished time, duration,

GPU request of recent 𝑘finished jobs

Job Attribute

arrival time, execution time until now,

GPU request of querying job

3.3

Search Controller

We follow the modularized scheduler design philosophy [4] to

implement a trace simulator, aiming at evaluating the scheduling

performance of each configuration. The trace simulator produces

outputs that comprise performance objectives and intermediate

performance metrics. These outputs are transformed into reward

values and auxiliary reward values, aligning with the principles of

reinforcement learning (RL)-based configuration tuning algorithms.

The trace simulator obviates the necessity for actual execution on

GPUs. As the overhead of configuration tuning is proportional

to the number of configuration sampling iterations and the cost

of performance evaluation, we develop a causal tuner and trace

aggregator to reduce these two terms, respectively.

3.3.1

Causal Tuner. Configuring a DLT scheduler introduces a

trade-off on intermediate performance metrics, which helps identify

the root cause of performance degradation. We desire to explicitly

model the intricate dependency of configuration parameters with

these intermediate performance metrics. To accomplish this, we

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

Wei Gao, Xu Zhang, Shan Huang, Shangwei Guo, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, and Tianwei Zhang

queue

thr

queue

starve

limit

pack

limit

priority

queuing

delay

preemption

overhead

speed

slowdown

JCT

Causal

Link

Config

Intermediate

Metrics

Perf.

Objective

Figure 7: The causal graph for Tiresias. The top layer con-

tains configuration variables, the intermediate layer contains

the intermediate metrics, and the bottom layer contains the

scheduling performance objectives.

construct a causal performance model, providing an automatic and

explicit representation of the trade-off effects. Subsequently, we

elaborate on how to utilize the learned causal structure to expedite

configuration tuning.

Causal Performance Model. This model takes the configuration

parameters as input and outputs the performance objectives. The

causal structure is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to uncover

the causality between configurations and performance objectives.

Figure 7 presents an example of the Tiresias scheduler. Here, we

consider a three-layer causal structure: configurations, intermediate

performance metrics, and performance objectives. The intermediate

performance metrics bridge the configurations and performance

objectives, explaining the performance contributions of each pa-

rameter to the performance objectives. A constraint is added for the

causal performance model: there is no casual dependency among

configurations and performance objectives for simplicity unless the

datacenter operator clarifies it.

The construction of the causal performance model takes three

steps. First, the datacenter operator determines the intermediate

performance metrics according to his expertise, and a fully con-

nected graph is constructed as the skeleton of the casual perfor-

mance model. Second, training samples are gathered by utilizing

the historical workloads and simulator to collect the intermedi-

ate performance metrics and performance objectives. Third, Fast

Causal Inference (FCI) [36] is adopted to learn the causal structure.

Configuration Tuning with Causal Performance Model. The

causal performance model is constructed from the fixed workloads.

It reuses the learned causality knowledge and maintains its predic-

tion accuracy when the datacenter environment changes moder-

ately [34]. The causal performance model is updated continuously

with the generated workloads to effectively adapt to the dynamic

environment.

We incorporate the causal performance model into configuration

tuning, as detailed in Algorithm 1. It is an iterative process, con-

taining six key steps. (1) Sampling (Line 5): we adopt BlueFin [24]

to perform configuration sampling because it can effectively tune

various data types (e.g., category, numerical) of configuration pa-

rameters. (2) Projection (Line 6): we project sampled configurations

to satisfy the dependency constraints specified by the datacenter

operator. (3) Rejection (Line 8-9): we adopt the causal performance

model to predict the performance objectives of sampled configu-

ration parameters, and reject unnecessary performance measure-

ments. We also introduce an exploration parameter 𝜖to ignore

the rejection step and explore new configurations. (4) Measure-

ment (Line 10): we deploy configurations and measure relevant

performance metrics. (5) Update (Line 11-13): we update the causal

Algorithm 1 Configuration Tuning with Causal Model.

1: Input: categorical and numerical parameters 𝐶, constrain rules

W, exploitation parameter 𝜖∈(0, 1), causal Model CM, maxi-

mum iterations 𝑇.

2: Output: best configuration parameters 𝐶^max.

3: Initialize: BlueFin Instance BF, best performance 𝑅^max= −∞,

relax factor 𝛾= 0.95, exploitation indicator 𝑒𝑙𝑝.

4: for 𝑡= 1, 2, . . . ,𝑇do

Sample configurations 𝐶𝑡using BF.

⊲Sampling

Project 𝐶𝑡to ^˜𝐶𝑡based on constraints.

⊲Projection

𝑒𝑙𝑝= random(0, 1) ≤𝜖

Predict the performance ^˜𝑅𝑡= CM( ^˜𝐶𝑡).

Skip to next round if ^˜𝑅𝑡≤𝛾𝑅^maxand 𝑒𝑙𝑝.

⊲Rejection

10:

Measure (auxiliary) reward 𝑅𝑡with ^˜𝐶𝑡.

⊲Measurement

11:

Set reward for BF.

12:

Update CM with reward and auxiliary reward.

13:

Update 𝑅^max, 𝐶^max.

⊲Update

14:

Perform what-if analysis and identify configurations that

do not exceed the best performance.

15:

Construct constraints that these configurations are fixed in

the next rounds.

16:

Add constraints into W.

⊲Scope

performance model and configurations. (6) Scope (Line 14-16): we

utilize the causal performance model to analyze which configura-

tions contribute to performance degradation, and narrow down the

sampled configuration options in the next round.

The causal performance model improves configuration tuning

by reducing performance measurements in the rejection step and

facilitating the learning of promising configurations with fewer

samples in the scope step. Case studies in Section 5 provide an

in-depth analysis of the impact of the causal performance model.

3.3.2

Trace Aggregator. The execution time of the performance

measurement on the simulator scales with the size of evaluated

workloads. We introduce the trace aggregator to reduce the amount

of evaluated DLT workloads and expedite the simulator-based per-

formance measurement. The recurrence feature of DLT workloads

implies the prevalence of similar DL workloads. Therefore, we

group similar workloads in the trace generated by the Generation

Engine according to their key attributes, including arrival time,

job duration, and GPU request. Note that we use the remaining

duration and GPU request to group existing-unfinished workloads.

For each aggregated workload, the arrival time and GPU request

are assigned as the average arrival time and the sum of GPU re-

quests of similar workloads, respectively. Such aggregation can

preserve the service load, especially in terms of GPU time. Subse-

quently, we calibrate the duration of the aggregated workload to

ensure the same service usage between the aggregated workload

and a group of similar workloads. We also calibrate some job at-

tributes for existing-unfinished workloads. In detail, we average

time-related attributes (e.g., queuing time, running time) and sum

up service-related attributes (e.g., attained service). Our case studies

in § 5 indicate that the trace aggregator reduces the performance

measurement overhead for each configuration by up to 5.8×.

AutoSched: An Adaptive Self-configured Framework for Scheduling Deep Learning Training Workloads

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

IMPLEMENTATION

AutoSched is implemented as a background service to configure

the DLT scheduler. Below we present the implementation details of

the Generation Engine, Search Controller and Scheduler Controller.

4.1

Generation Engine

We set up the Generation Engine as a container instance and utilize

gRPC [15] to trigger the workload generation. In the local predictor,

we sort the jobs according to their arrival time and select the first

70% jobs as the training dataset. We adopt XGBoost 2.0.0 to train the

DT and sweep parameters to determine the best hyperparameters.

To adapt to the dynamic scheduling environments, we retrain the

DT model at an interval of one day on newly collected workloads.

Besides, the granularity of the duration categories, represented by

𝑛,𝑡1, ...𝑡5, are 5, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hour, and 4 hour,

respectively. In the global generator, we provide a Python-based

implementation to bucketize the workload repository according to

the hour of workload submissions.

4.2

Search Controller

The core part of the trace aggregator is to recalibrate the attributes

of aggregated workloads, which takes less than 50 lines of code for

the implementation of each scheduler.

Trace Simulator. We implement a trace simulator, which contains

∼8,000 lines of Python code, excluding the scheduling policy. The

fidelity of simulator is validated by comparisons with the open-

source implementation of existing DL schedulers [16, 19, 28]. To

minimize the difference between actual execution and simulation,

we gather critical metrics (e.g., communication overhead, job colo-

cation interference) from historical workloads. Thus, the scheduler

provides an effective way to evaluate the scheduling performance

of each new configuration without actually running the DLT sched-

uler in a large-scale GPU datacenter.

Causal Tuner. We optimize the causal performance model based

on CausalNex 0.12.1. The causal graph is constructed in the of-

fline phase, and fine-tuned in the online phase. We modify the

open-sourced BlueFin [24] to support the projection, rejection and

update operations. We fix the interval of updating the configuration

parameters as 1 hour and the maximum number of iterations 𝑇

as 40. Nevertheless, the tuned configuration parameters might be

ineffective in the case of bursty workload submissions. The causal

tuner runs with a more fine-grained interval (e.g., 5 minutes). When

the tuned configuration outperforms the currently-adopted one by

a predefined threshold (e.g., 1.1) with regard to the performance ob-

jectives, we update the configuration parameters, ensuring timely

adjustments to accommodate the variations in the workload pat-

terns and maintain the optimal scheduling performance.

4.3

Scheduler Controller

The Scheduler Controller has two functions: (1) it provides an API

to update the configuration parameters for various DLT schedulers;

(2) it monitors schedulable workloads and stores them into the

workload repository.

EVALUATION

We evaluate how AutoSched facilitates the configuration tuning

of three state-of-the-art DLT schedulers.

5.1

Experiment Setup

DLT Traces. We choose a two-week trace in Philly from September

22 to October 6, 2017, a two-week trace in Helios from July 26 to

August 9, 2020, and a two-week trace in PAI from the 84th to the

98th day for our evaluation. Among these traces, only PAI provides

details on the cluster capacity. Taking such job load as a standard,

we vary the cluster capacity using a base-10 scale to search for a

comparable job load versus the GPU cluster capacity. Specifically,

the cluster capacities for Philly, Helios, and PAI are set as 100, 70,

and 100 8-GPU servers, respectively.

DLT Schedulers. AutoSched can work with different scheduling

systems. Without the loss of generality, we choose three main-

stream DLT schedulers: Tiresias, Themis, and Lucid. We choose

them for two reasons. First, the configurations of these DLT sched-

ulers are representative and widely adopted by other schedulers.

Second, they are designed for managing substantial DLT workloads

in large-scale GPU datacenters. AutoSched aims to enhance these

DLT schedulers through advanced configuration tuning. We employ

our trace simulator to assess the efficiency of AutoSched. The sig-

nificant performance benefits observed in the evaluation strengthen

our belief that AutoSched can deliver satisfactory performance in

a production environment.

Baselines. We consider three competitive configuration tuning

baselines compared with AutoSched. (1) Fixed: we search optimal

configurations on our evaluated bi-weekly traces and fix their us-

age in our evaluation. It is a stronger baseline than searching for

fixed configurations using historical workloads. (2) SelfTune: we

dynamically search the configurations on the historical traces. (3)

Optimal: we adopt our Search Controller on realistic future DL

workloads. This is ideal and cannot be achieved in practice.

Table 3: Test accuracy (%) and latency (seconds per 1000 sam-

ples) of various models on different DLT traces.

Algorithm

Philly

Helios

PAI

Inference

Fine-tuning

XGBoost

88.21

90.41

82.68

0.0331

0.3291

LightGBM

87.78

89.93

82.92

0.0318

0.2132

RandomForest

88.08

88.19

79.06

0.0420

0.3489

MLP

85.53

86.37

61.60

0.0175

3.1740

84.93

80.99

65.79

0.0030

0.1212

Table 4: Average relative percentage difference (%) and latency

(seconds per 1000 samples) of the causal performance model

on different traces.

Algorithm

Philly

Helios

PAI

Inference

Fine-tuning

Causal Model

14.23

11.17

15.16

0.0927

1.4731

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

Wei Gao, Xu Zhang, Shan Huang, Shangwei Guo, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, and Tianwei Zhang

Difference

Original

Periodic

(a) Philly

Difference

Original

Periodic

(b) Helios

Difference

Original

Periodic

Figure 8: Job request differences between the generated and

actual DLT traces over days.

5.2

Effectiveness of ML Models in AutoSched

Local Predictor. We select different ML models for the local pre-

dictor, and Table 3 presents their prediction accuracy on various

DLT traces. We also report their corresponding inference and fine-

tuning latency for 1000 samples. In general, XGBoost achieves the

best accuracy, and the inference and fine-tuning latency is accept-

able in practical systems. Besides, thanks to the interpretability

of XGBoost, we observe the strong correlation between the job

attributes of recent arrival and completed jobs and the duration of

newly arrived jobs by visualizing its results. For Helios and PAI,

we further remove the user information from the traces, and the

corresponding accuracy is degraded by 3.77% and 7.18% accuracy.

respectively. This highlights the importance of user information in

model accuracy improvement.

Global Generator. We conduct comparative analysis using two

types of DLT traces: the Original trace, which consists of raw trace

data, and the Periodic trace, derived from the Original trace through

FFT processing. The Periodic trace captures inherent periodic job

submission trends and activity bursts. For each trace type, we gen-

erate future traces and quantify the relative differences in the num-

ber of job requests between the ground-truth future arrival traces

and the generated ones. Figure 8 shows the generation based on

the original trace exhibits significant deviations and unpredictable

peak error values. The difference range observed in this case spans

from 0.6 to 2.3 across various traces. In contrast, a remarkable re-

semblance is evident between the generated and periodic traces,

Philly

Helios

PAI

1.0

1.5

2.0

Norm. JCT

1.30

1.22

1.58

1.33

1.12

1.28

0.99

1.01

1.16

1.00

Fixed

SelfTune

AutoSched

Optimal

Figure 9: End-to-end performance on Tiresias.

exhibiting a significantly lower difference range of 0.3 to 1.0. This

suggests that our global generator, while straightforward in de-

sign, is highly effective in capturing the periodic arrival patterns of

future DLT workloads.

Causal Inference. We divide the DLT trace into day-length traces,

and select several segments with comparable service usage and

exhaustively evaluate various configurations to optimize the causal

performance model for different schedulers. This is conducted in

the offline phase to eliminate the high overhead of model training.

The model fine-tuning is performed in the online phase. We present

the average relative percentage difference between the prediction

result and the actual scheduling performance in our evaluation, as

well as the inference and fine-tuning time in Table 4. The causal

performance model can achieve satisfactory prediction accuracy

with acceptable inference and fine-tuning latency.

5.3

Case Study 1: Tiresias

Configurations. In the Scheduling Module, Tiresias provides three

ways to compute the priority of each job: time, service, and

Gittins Index. The priority values are discretized to prevent

continuous priorities leading to frequent job preemption. The prior-

ity discretization introduces two configurations: queue and queue

threshold. The value of queue determines the number of queue

thresholds. To reduce the long queuing delay and avoid starva-

tion, Tiresias promotes a job to the highest priority queue if it has

been waiting longer than a threshold starve limit. In the Place-

ment Module, Tiresias sets a threshold pack limit to compute the

amount of skew in parameter tensor distributions and determine

whether to implement the consolidation placement. Configuring

pack limit balances the job runtime speed slowdown and queuing

delay.

End-to-end Scheduling Performance. Figure 9 compares the

end-to-end JCT performance across various DLT traces. We normal-

ize the JCT using the Optimal baseline. We observe that SelfTune

consistently outperforms the Fixed baseline on Helios and PAI,

while showing a slightly lower performance than the Fixed base-

line on Philly. This highlights the limitation of relying solely on

an adaptive approach without considering the prediction of future

workloads when configuring DLT schedulers. AutoSched incorpo-

rates the workload prediction and achieves 1.10−1.36× JCT speedup

compared to SelfTune, demonstrating the positive effect of future

workloads. Moreover, the performance gap between AutoSched

and the Optimal baseline is relatively narrow. The Optimal baseline

adopts the same Search Controller to perform configuration tuning,

and the causal tuner in the Search Controller might skip evaluat-

ing certain configuration parameters, making AutoSched achieve

AutoSched: An Adaptive Self-configured Framework for Scheduling Deep Learning Training Workloads

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

Philly

Helios

PAI

2.5

3.0

3.5

4.0

Avg. JCT

(Hour)

2.93

3.10

3.13

2.83

3.06

2.90

3.12

3.20

2.85

3.08

2.99

w/o Search Controller

w/ Trace Aggregator

w/ Causal Tuner

w/ Search Controller

Figure 10: Impact of Search Controller on Tiresias.

w/o CT w/ CT

Philly

10²

10³

10⁴

Latency (Sec)

w/o CT w/ CT

Helios

10¹

10²

10³

w/o CT w/ CT

PAI

10¹

10²

10³

Figure 11: Search overhead of causal tuner on Tiresias.

w/o TA w/ TA

Philly

10¹

10²

10³

10⁴

Latency (Sec)

w/o TA w/ TA

Helios

10¹

10²

10³

w/o TA w/ TA

PAI

10¹

10²

10³

Figure 12: Search overhead of trace aggregator on Tiresias.

better JCT performance on Philly. Overall, AutoSched shows ad-

vantages in improving JCT performance for Tiresias across different

scenarios.

Similarity Metric Selection. In our global generator, we utilize

the absolute difference (Manhattan distance) between the reference

segment (recent past hour) and historical traces. This similarity

metric is straightforward and intuitive, yielding promising empiri-

cal results in our evaluation. Although we explored various other

similarity metrics, the average JCT results reported in Table 5 reveal

that both Manhattan and Euclidean metrics demonstrate compara-

ble performance. However, both Cosine and Pearson metrics exhibit

a performance drop of over 5%. In summary, our adoption of the

Manhattan distance metric demonstrates satisfactory performance.

Table 5: Avg. JCT across various similarity metrics.

Metrics

Philly

Helios

PAI

Metrics

Philly

Helios

PAI

Manhattan

2.851

3.082

2.988

Euclidean

2.853

3.089

2.978

Pearson

2.996

3.160

3.151

Cosine

3.108

3.195

3.155

Impact of Search Controller. We explore the impact of the Search

Controller on the scheduling performance and search overhead.

Figure 10 analyzes the influences of the trace aggregator and the

causal tuner on the average JCT of AutoSched. Particularly, “w/o

Search Controller” refers to the absence of the Search Controller,

“w/ Causal Tuner” refers to only enabling the causal tuner in the

Search Controller, “w/ Trace Aggregator” refers to only enabling the

trace aggregator in the Search Controller, and “w/ Search Controller”

refers to enabling both the causal tuner and trace aggregator to-

gether. Note that we reduce the number of configuration tuning

iterations to 10 for “w/o Search Controller” because of its enormous

0.5

1.0

1.5

Philly

100

CDF

0.5

1.0

1.5

Helios

100

0.5

1.0

1.5

PAI

100

Fixed

SelfTune

AutoSched

Optimal

Figure 13: End-to-end performance on Themis.

Philly

Helios

PAI

100

FTF

75.30

72.65

78.52

74.38

73.58

73.71

70.88

72.65

76.34

71.97

73.19

74.40

w/o Search Controller

w/ Trace Aggregator

w/ Causal Tuner

w/ Search Controller

Figure 14: Impact of Search Controller on Themis.

w/o CT w/ CT

Philly

10²

10⁴

Latency (Sec)

w/o CT w/ CT

Helios

10²

10³

w/o CT w/ CT

PAI

10²

10³

Figure 15: Search overhead of causal tuner on Themis.

configuration tuning overhead. AutoSched searches the configu-

ration parameters on the future workload prediction rather than

realistic future workloads; the Search Controller does not always

bring negative scheduling performance. Furthermore, with more

configuration tuning iterations, the Search Controller even further

improves the scheduling performance of Tiresias.

Figure 11 illustrates how the causal tuner reduces the overhead

of configuration tuning across various DLT traces. Specifically, we

disable the trace aggregator and report the violin plot of tuning

overhead across different iterations of configuration search. The

causal tuner reduces the overhead to 9.5-22.7×, bringing it down

from thousands of seconds to mere hundreds of seconds. Further-

more, in Figure 12, we compare the configuration tuning overhead

of AutoSched with and without the trace aggregator while en-

abling the causal tuner in both scenarios. The trace aggregator

further expedites the configuration tuning to 2.6-5.8×, maintaining

the overhead within one hundred seconds, with the majority com-

pleting within half a minute. Overall, the Search Controller reduces

the configuration overhead up to 132 ×.

Causal Graph. The learned causal graph of Tiresias is shown in

Figure 7, which aligns with our expectation. The causal graph acts

as an experienced expert to help the causal tuner quickly identify

the most important configurations to tune. In the configuration

tuning, the causal graph often constrains the search space into

queue-related configurations, demonstrating the importance of

queue-related configurations and curbing the configuration tuning

space for AutoSched.

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

Wei Gao, Xu Zhang, Shan Huang, Shangwei Guo, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, and Tianwei Zhang

w/o TA w/ TA

Philly

10¹

10²

10³

Latency (Sec)

w/o TA w/ TA

Helios

10¹

10²

10³

w/o TA w/ TA

PAI

10¹

10²

10³

Figure 16: Search overhead of trace aggregator on Themis.

lease

thr

priority

queuing

delay

preemption

overhead

speed

slowdown

fraction

FTF

Job

load

(a) Causal Graph

100

Configuration Search Iteration

Lease Term

x10³

0.5

1.0

Job Load

lease term

job load

(b) Lease Term

Figure 17: Causal analysis of Themis: (a) Learned causal

graph; (b) Comparison between lease term and job load

across different iterations of configuration search.

5.4

Case Study 2: Themis

Configurations. Themis [28] defines a metric called finish time

fairness (𝜌) and aims to maximize the number of jobs with 𝜌≤1.

In its Scheduling Module, Themis introduces a configuration lease

term to indicate an exclusive GPU resource usage for a fixed period.

Like Tiresias, Themis provides two choices to compute the lease

term: time and service. We denote this configuration option as

priority. A DLT workload with lease expiry needs to participate

in resource re-allocations. A large lease term sacrifices the fair-

ness, but a small lease term incurs high preemption overhead.

At each scheduling round, Themis utilizes a parameter fraction

𝑓to trade off fairness and efficiency. Specifically, it selects (1 −𝑓)

fraction of workloads with the largest 𝜌and prioritizes the resource

allocations for them. A small fraction incentivizes the fast com-

pletion of short-term jobs and reduces resource contention. A large

fraction minimizes the maximum 𝜌among DLT jobs to implicitly

enforce fairness. In the Placement Module, Themis introduces a

similar threshold thr as Tiresias to determine whether to relax the

consolidation placement constraint for workloads.

End-to-end Scheduling Performance. Figure 13 compares the

CDF of finish-time fairness (FTF) among AutoSched and three base-

lines across various DLT traces. As discussed in a prior study [12],

maximizing fairness is more difficult than minimizing the JCT with

the oracle future knowledge. The performance gap between Self-

Tune and Optimal is limited, leaving less improvement space. Nev-

ertheless, AutoSched attains (1.07−1.12×) improvement compared

to Fixed baselines in terms of the number of jobs with 𝜌≤1.

Impact of Search Controller. We investigate the effect of the

Search Controller on the FTF performance and configuration over-

head. Figure 14 reports the ratio of jobs with 𝜌≤1. The Search

Controller reduces FTF by 4% and 5% on Philly and PAI, respectively.

Improving FTF is more challenging than reducing JCT, making the

Search Controller’s impact on the FTF performance pronounced.

Following the evaluation approach of Tiresias, we present how

the causal tuner and trace aggregator expedite the configuration

tuning in Figures 15 and 16 respectively. The causal tuner reduces

Philly

Helios

PAI

1.0

1.5

2.0

Norm. JCT

1.35

1.52

1.53

1.24

1.21

1.27

1.06

1.04

1.10

1.00

Fixed

SelfTune

AutoSched

Optimal

Figure 18: End-to-end performance on Lucid.

Philly

Helios

PAI

4.0

4.5

5.0

5.5

Avg. JCT

(Hour)

4.33

4.23

4.51

4.37

4.29

4.67

4.41

4.39

4.59

4.35

4.40

4.61

w/o Search Controller

w/ Trace Aggregator

w/ Causal Tuner

w/ Search Controller

Figure 19: Impact of Search Controller on Lucid.

w/o CT

w/ CT

Philly

10¹

10²

10³

Latency (Sec)

w/o CT

w/ CT

Helios

10¹

10²

10³

w/o CT

w/ CT

PAI

10¹

10²

10³

(a) Causal Tuner

w/o TA

w/ TA

Philly

10⁰

10¹

10²

10³

Latency (Sec)

w/o TA

w/ TA

Helios

10¹

10²

10³

w/o TA

w/ TA

PAI

10⁰

10¹

10²

10³

(b) Trace Aggregator

Figure 20: The search overhead analysis of (a) the causal tuner

and (b) the trace aggregator on Lucid.

the configuration tuning overhead to 4.8-5.5×. The trace aggregator

further brings 1.9-3.9× configuration tuning reduction. In conclu-

sion, the Search Controller effectively reduces the configuration

tuning overhead while maintaining an acceptable degradation in

the FTF performance of AutoSched on Themis.

Causal Analysis. Figure 17(a) visualizes the causal graph of Themis.

In our evaluation, the causal graph constraints tune configurations

for lease term many times. Specifically, Figure 17(b) depicts the

dynamic changes in the lease term and job load throughout

various configuration search iterations. The job load is the ra-

tio of the total GPU requests to the number of jobs. We observe

fluctuations in the lease term corresponding to variations in the

job load. In the high job load, AutoSched configures relatively

small lease term while setting a large one for the low job load.

The fixed lease term is not an efficient choice for maintaining the

FTF performance of Themis.

5.5

Case Study 3: Lucid

Configurations. Lucid [19] packs jobs on the same GPUs to opti-

mize the JCT of Lucid by tuning its configurations. In the Admission

Module, Lucid configures the profiler capacity to balance the

AutoSched: An Adaptive Self-configured Framework for Scheduling Deep Learning Training Workloads

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

pack

knob

queuing

delay

cluster

utilization

speed

slowdown

JCT

profiler

capacity

(a) Causal Graph

profiler capacity

pack knob

Update

Frequency (%)

12.50

43.10

(b) Update Frequency

Figure 21: Causal analysis of Lucid: (a) Causal graph; (b) Up-

date frequency of Lucid’s configurations on Helios trace.

queuing delay and cluster utilization. In the Placement Module,

Lucid provides a pack knob to determine whether to pack DLT

workloads on the same GPU device. This configuration balances

the job runtime speed and queuing delay.

End-to-end Performance. Figure 18 shows the JCT of AutoSched

and other baselines across various DLT traces. AutoSched out-

performs SelfTune by up to 1.15 - 1.17× in terms of JCT. The per-

formance gap between AutoSched and the Optimal baseline on

PAI is minor except on PAI. PAI trace contains more small and

short-term jobs, leaving more optimization space to pack jobs in

the same GPUs [41]. More accurate future traces can bring higher

performance improvement while our local predictor on PAI trace

in Table 3 is not as accurate as that on Philly and Helios, further

confirming the significance of future workload prediction.

Impact of Search Controller. We first show how the Search Con-

troller influences the scheduling performance across various DLT

traces in Figure 19. Overall, the causal tuner and trace aggregator

increase the average JCT within 5%. We further study the benefits

of the Search Controller in reducing the configuration latency. The

configuration parameter space of Lucid is relatively small compared

to that of Tiresias and Themis. The Search Controller limits the

configuration optimization space for AutoSched and always brings

negative scheduling performance. Figures 20(a) and 20(b) further

demonstrate that the causal tuner and trace aggregator can reduce

the configuration latency by up to 3.4× and 5.7× respectively.

Causal Analysis. We additionally showcase the causal graph of

Lucid in Figure 21(a). The learned causal graph implies the trade-

off effect of Lucid’s configurations. Moreover, Figure 21(b) shows

the update frequency of pack knob and profiler capacity on

Helios. With the learned causal model, the causal tuner narrows

down the scope of tuned configurations on pack knob to adapt

to changing intermediate performance metrics including queuing

delay and speed slowdown of cluster-wide workloads.

DISCUSSION

Limited Configuration Options. Some DLT schedulers may pos-

sess a limited number of configuration options. Our Generation En-

gine facilitates the configuration tuning, and the casual tuner also

provides transparent and explainable decisions about configuration

selection. AutoSched still contributes to such DLT schedulers.

Small-scale GPU Datacenters. A small-scale GPU datacenter

(with ≤32 GPUs) may constrain the impact of various configu-

ration parameters, curtailing the opportunities for optimization

through configuration tuning. Considering the constrained poten-

tial benefits achievable through configuration tuning, AutoSched

is less desirable to attain significant performance improvement.

Dependence on Trace Pattern. We adopt three DLT traces widely

embraced by current DLT schedulers [4, 19, 27]. Overall, they can

represent the general situation of DLT trace pattern. Even with

the change of trace pattern, AutoSched can reactively run config-

uration tuning as a background process, and the significant per-

formance gap between the deployed and tuned parameters will

trigger the replacement of parameters. Thus, DLT schedulers can

still benefit from AutoSched.

RELATED WORKS

DLT Schedulers. The success of DL technology is propelled by

the advent of large-scale GPU datacenters. Hence, various DLT

schedulers [9, 16, 21, 31, 32, 42, 44] have been proposed to optimize

DLT workloads in GPU datacenters. They introduce configurable

innovations across different modules, as discussed in Section 2.2.

AutoSched is a framework that further strengthens these sched-

ulers by dynamically tuning their configurations.

Configuration Tuning. The optimization of system performance

through configuration tuning has long been a focal point in the

system community [17, 45]. Traditional configuration tuning sys-

tems primarily concentrate on adjusting parameters for specific

applications, such as databases [39, 40], compilers [5, 11], and stor-

age [6, 7]. Recent advancements [24, 35] shift the focus towards

automatic configuration for cluster management systems. How-

ever, their proposed tuning algorithms are specifically designed

for big data schedulers that operate at a time scale of minutes. In

contrast, AutoSched excels in optimizing the configurations of

DLT schedulers, which have significantly distinct features.

Causal Analysis in Systems. Causal analysis has been applied

in numerous system domains, such as software engineering [33],

performance debugging [3], and cloud systems [29]. Recently, Uni-

corn [22] and CAMEO [34] introduced causal performance pre-

dictors to expedite the configuration tuning systems. While these

efforts focus on relatively stable environments, our approach draws

inspiration from them and customizes causal analysis for dynamic

scheduling environments.

CONCLUSION

This paper presents AutoSched, a framework to automate config-

uration tuning for DLT schedulers in a large-scale GPU datacenter.

AutoSched designs the Generation Engine to yield more realistic

workloads for configuration search. Also, it develops the Search Con-

troller to mitigate the substantial search overhead by curbing the

configuration search space and reducing the performance measure-

ment overhead without sacrificing the performance. Our evaluation

on three representative DLT schedulers across different production

traces confirms the efficiency and generality of AutoSched.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

The research is supported under the RIE2020 Industry Alignment

ICS ’24, June 04–07, 2024, Kyoto, Japan

Wei Gao, Xu Zhang, Shan Huang, Shangwei Guo, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, and Tianwei Zhang

Fund - Industry Collaboration Projects (IAF-ICP) Funding Initia-

tive, as well as cash and in-kind contribution from the industry

partner(s).

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