Proxy-Based Thermal and Acoustic Evaluation of Cloud GPUs for AI Training Workloads

The use of cloud-based Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to train and deploy Deep Learning models has grown rapidly in importance, with the demand to learn more about their thermal and acoustic behavior under real-world workloads. A normal cloud cannot make direct telemetry like temperature, fan speed, or acoustic emissions. To overcome such shortcomings, this study quantifies GPU workloads' thermal and acoustic output with a proxy-based model derived from available metrics such as GPU utilization, memory provisioning, power consumption, and empirical Thermal Design Power (TDP) values. They compare the two typical AI tasks, BERT on natural language processing and YOLOv5 on real-time object detection, on Colab-based NVIDIA GPUs (T4, V100, P100). The nvidia-smi was used to gather runtime logs, and the specifications of the GPUs have been obtained in the form of public Kaggle datasets. Proxy statistics, including TDP-per-MHz and thermal load (Power * Duration), were calculated to model heat loss due to workload. To measure the degree of acoustic impact, a threshold of TDP was applied to approximate the level of fan-driven acoustics. The visual analytics, such as boxplot, scatterplot, and bubble plot, demonstrated certain considerable distinctions in the stress patterns of GPUs: the BERT jobs demanded extremely high cumulative thermal load and medium acoustic effect, whereas the YOLOv5 demonstrated bursty power footprint and substantial acoustic imprint on high-TDP GPUs. The findings reveal that proxy estimation is reproducible, interpretable, and a lightweight substitute for determining the GPU thermal and acoustic behavior of a machine used in the cloud setting. Such a solution facilitates making thermal-aware schedules, optimizing the infrastructure, and deploying AI models with reduced energy consumption in multi-tenant GPU environments.