Can I load more process into GPU if RAM is free but GPU Util is showing almost full?

Question

nvidia-smi is showing as

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 440.33.01    Driver Version: 440.33.01    CUDA Version: 10.2     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  Quadro K620         On   | 00000000:02:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 65%   74C    P0    20W /  30W |    758MiB /  1994MiB |     98%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1314      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                            31MiB |
|    0      1927      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                           187MiB |
|    0      2139      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                         248MiB |
|    0      4055      G   ...AAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAAAAAAA= --shared-files    85MiB |
|    0      5824      G   /opt/teamviewer/tv_bin/TeamViewer              8MiB |
|    0     14613      C   gmx                                           73MiB |
|    0     21803      G   /usr/lib/rstudio/bin/rstudio                  59MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

As you can see GPU util is showing 98%

But RAM is still free - 758MiB / 1994MiB

What does exactly GPU-Util mean? Can I load one more process into the GPU now?

Especially I wish to load a molecular dynamics simulation to GPU. (gmx)

Answer 1

GPU-Util is the percentage of time, over the last sample period, during which at least one kernel was running on the GPU.

98% means that your GPU is being used nearly all the time, probably by gmx, so there might not be any spare capacity to run another compute task.