ScaleRAN: A Runtime for Elastic GPU Resource Management in AI-RAN

Abstract: AI-RAN is driving the convergence of radio access network (RAN) processing and AI workloads on GPU-enabled computing platforms, ranging from GPU-accelerated base stations to cloud-native infrastructures. While GPU acceleration improves the efficiency of virtualized RAN functions, the computational demand of latency-critical baseband processing varies with traffic load, creating transient spare GPU capacity that can be reclaimed by co-located AI applications. Existing GPU-sharing mechanisms rely on coarse-grained hardware partitioning or static resource allocation, limiting their ability to adapt to slot-level workload fluctuations while preserving strict timing requirements. This paper presents ScaleRAN, a node-local runtime for elastic GPU resource management in AI-RAN. ScaleRAN leverages NVIDIA Green Contexts to dynamically partition Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) between RAN and AI workloads through a ladder of pre-created GPU partitions, enabling low-overhead resource reallocation at RAN slot granularity. The proposed runtime naturally supports Open-RAN (O-RAN) O-Cloud deployments, one representative AI-RAN deployment scenario. To drive these reallocations, we propose a reactive controller inspired by Kubernetes autoscaling and a proactive controller based on quantile regression and conformal prediction. We also develop LDPCSim, a GPU-accelerated workload generator built on NVIDIA Aerial for reproducible evaluation. Results show that predictive fine-grained GPU partitioning satisfies slot-level RAN deadlines while increasing the GPU resources available to co-located AI workloads, demonstrating the practicality of elastic GPU sharing for future AI-RAN platforms.