Measuring the impact of virtualization and containerization on the environment when using GPUs for processing the AI models

Introduction The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly increased computing demand, intensifying the operational strain on the computing environment. While virtualization and containerization are established technologies for resource optimization, their comparative energy efficiency and environmental impact, particularly under GPU-accelerated AI workloads, are not well-quantified. Methods This study evaluates the energy consumption and environmental impact of virtualization and containerization technologies when using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for AI model execution. Employing a computer vision benchmark, the performance, GPU resource utilization, and power consumption were measured. The experiment involved training a DenseNet-121 model on the MNIST dataset within a VirtualBox virtual machine and a Docker container environment. Results The analysis indicates that containerization consistently surpasses virtualization in energy efficiency. Specifically, Docker container configuration demonstrated an approximately 21.6% reduction in total energy consumption, and a corresponding reduction in carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions compared to a VirtualBox virtual machine. Furthermore, containerization exhibited lower average and peak GPU utilization and power consumption. Discussion These findings demonstrate that containerization offers a more energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable approach than VirtualBox virtualization for the specific GPU-enabled AI workload evaluated in this study. Statistical significance testing indicates that the observed performance differentials are significant, supporting the validity of the results within the experimental scope of this work. Conclusion Implementing containerization in this experimental setup may reduce energy consumption and environmental impact without compromising computational performance. Future studies should extend these analyses to larger neural network models, diverse AI workloads, and heterogeneous GPU platforms to enhance the generalizability of these findings beyond the current single-system experimental configuration.