We use pytest-xdist to speed-up test execution, and invoke pytest -n auto.

Executing tests using N processes, we scale GPU allocation footprint by a factor of N as well (in the worst case scenario). This risks running into spurious OutOfMemoryError exceptions of our own doing.

A simple solution would be to introduce a pytest mark, say pytest.mark.large to mark those tests that make large GPU memory allocations and exclude them using pytest command line argument -m "not large" in CI jobs.

Alternative solution might be to introduce exclusive_gpu_use_lock based on FileLock as in https://pytest-xdist.readthedocs.io/en/latest/how-to.html#making-session-scoped-fixtures-execute-only-once

The lock would be used around blocks making and using GPU allocations, and would need to make sure to release GPU allocations before releasing the lock. Doing so would overlap JIT-ting steps, allocation and execution steps, and host validation steps while making sure that GPU allocation/execution/validation steps are serialized.