We spent about two weeks making our GPU utilization metrics trustworthy by enabling DCGM profiling counters and correcting which workloads the measurements were attributed to. The result was a list of eleven GPUs across two Kubernetes clusters that had stayed below 5% SM utilization for a month. One was holding 40GB of framebuffer despite serving no workload.
When I brought the list to a capacity review, nobody disputed the numbers, but every GPU had a justification. Two were being held as launch headroom, three belonged to a team that acquired them during a shortage and refuses to release them while supply still feels uncertain, and one was a research machine with a stale CUDA context left by someone who departed months ago.
The problem is that none of these justifications is recorded in the cluster. An intentionally reserved GPU and an accidentally abandoned one look identical in utilization data and allocation records. Labels seem like the obvious solution, but nobody keeps them current for long. What processes or tooling do you use to distinguish legitimate reservations from waste and make someone accountable for each idle GPU?
3 Answers
Treat a reservation as a lease, not a permanent label. Give it an owner, a purpose, an expiration date, and a renewal process that requires a short explanation. The cluster can carry those fields as metadata, but the important part is the review and expiry. An idle card with a current lease is intentional; one with an expired lease becomes an actionable exception.
Separate the reporting categories instead of relying on one utilization number. Track active use, approved standby capacity, stale allocations, and unowned resources, then set different policies for each. Require an explicit owner and review date for standby capacity, and automatically alert or reclaim resources when the date passes. That turns the report from a list of idle cards into a list of decisions that need an owner.
Tie the GPUs to teams or cost centers and make the owning group absorb the cost of keeping reserved capacity. Internal billing or at least a visible capacity charge usually changes the conversation more effectively than utilization dashboards. If a group still wants to pay for insurance capacity, that is a valid decision, but it is no longer invisible waste.
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