Multi-objective power management for CMPs in the dark silicon age

• New power management challenges in networked many-core systems arise when limitations of the dark silicon era come into reality. The main goal in the power management process is to achieve optimal power-performance efficiency considering thermal design power (TDP) budget. This necessitates: (1) monitoring several system characteristics including both communication and computation aspects, (2) categorizing, prioritizing, and processing the information in an intelligent way, and (3) controlling a rich set of actuators. More precisely, a comprehensive Observe-Decide-Act (ODA) loop based multi-objective control approach is needed, which has access to a rich set of sensors and actuators. In this chapter, we first identify a necessary set of system parameters for monitoring such as an upper limit on total power consumption, dynamic behavior of workloads, utilization of processing elements, per-core power consumption, load on network-on-chip (NoC), etc. We also discuss essential actuators needed for the power management process together with a multi-objective and dark silicon aware power management policy that is able to simultaneously consider all the mentioned parameters. As actuator, fine-grained voltage and frequency scaling is utilized, including near-threshold operation, per-core power gating, as well as scheduler-level actuation to maximize the system throughput while honoring the power budget.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Annan data- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Other Computer and Information Science (hsv//eng)

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