dJay: Enabling High-density Multi-tenancy for Cloud Gaming Servers with Dynamic Cost-Benefit GPU Load Balancing

In cloud gaming, servers perform remote rendering on behalf of thin clients. Such a server must deliver sufficient frame rate (at least 30fps) to each of its clients. At the same time, each client desires an immersive experience, and therefore the server should also provide the best graphics quality possible to each client. Statically provisioning time slices of the server GPU for each client suffers from severe underutilization because clients can come and go, and scenes that the clients need rendered can vary greatly in terms of GPU resource usage over time.

In this work, we present dJay, a utility-maximizing cloud gaming server that dynamically tunes client GPU rendering workloads in order to 1) ensure all clients get satisfactory frame rate, and 2) provide the best possible graphics quality across clients. To accomplish this, we develop three main components. First, we build an online profiler that collects key cost and benefit data, and distills the data into a reusable regression model. Second, we build an online utility optimizer that uses the regression model to tune GPU workloads for better graphics quality. The optimizer solves the Multiple Choice Knapsack problem. We demonstrate dJay on two high quality commercial games, Doom 3 and Fable 3. Our results show that when compared to a static configuration, we can respond much better to peaks and troughs, achieving up to four times the multi-tenant density on a single server while offering clients the best possible graphics quality.