DMCA
Variation-Aware Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling
| Citations: | 26 - 1 self |
BibTeX
@MISC{Herbert_variation-awaredynamic,
author = {Sebastian Herbert and Diana Marculescu},
title = {Variation-Aware Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling},
year = {}
}
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Abstract
Fine-grained dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS) is an important tool in managing the balance between power and performance in chip-multiprocessors. Although manufacturing process variations are giving rise to significant core-to-core variations in power and performance, traditional DVFS controllers are unaware of these variations. Exploiting the different power/performance profiles of the cores can significantly improve energy-efficiency. Two hardware DVFS control algorithms are considered and the gains enabled by incorporating variability-awareness are demonstrated on multithreaded commercial workloads. For a design with per-core voltage/frequency islands (VFIs), the mean power per unit throughput for a simple threshold-based controller is reduced by 8.0 % when variability-awareness is added. A complex greedy-search controller sees an even larger reduction of 15.4%. The variability-aware versions of the two controllers achieve power/throughput reductions of 2.1 % and 9.9 % relative to LinOpt, a recent software variability-aware DVFS scheme. Designs which apply DVFS at a coarser granularity are also considered, and the variability-aware schemes maintain significant improvement over the-unaware ones. With four cores per VFI, variability-awareness reduces power/throughput by 6.5 % and 9.2 % for the thresholdbased and greedy-search controllers, respectively. 1.
Keyphrases
variation-aware dynamic voltage frequency scaling variability-aware version mean power the-unaware one recent software variability-aware dvfs scheme fine-grained dynamic voltage frequency scaling power throughput reduction greedy-search controller variability-aware scheme significant core-to-core variation significant improvement variability-awareness reduces power coarser granularity multithreaded commercial workload per-core voltage frequency island hardware dvfs control algorithm simple threshold-based controller traditional dvfs controller important tool manufacturing process variation different power performance profile unit throughput complex greedy-search controller
