The NVIDIA GPU Operator enables oversubscription of GPUs through a set of extended options for the NVIDIA Kubernetes Device Plugin. GPU time-slicing enables workloads that are scheduled on oversubscribed GPUs to interleave with one another.
This mechanism for enabling time-slicing of GPUs in Kubernetes enables a system administrator to define a set of replicas for a GPU, each of which can be handed out independently to a pod to run workloads on. Unlike Multi-Instance GPU (MIG), there is no memory or fault-isolation between replicas, but for some workloads this is better than not being able to share at all. Internally, GPU time-slicing is used to multiplex workloads from replicas of the same underlying GPU.