Power-performance efficiency of asymmetric multiprocessors for multi-threaded scientific applications
Ryan Eric Grant, Ahmad Afsahi · 2006
Recently, under a fixed power budget, asymmetric multiprocessors (AMP) have been proposed to improve the performance of multi-threaded applications compared to symmetric multiprocessors. An AMP is a multiprocessor system in which its processors are not operating at the same frequency. Power consumption has become an important design constraint in servers and high-performance server clusters. This paper explores the power-performance efficiency of Hyper-Threaded (HT) AMP servers, and proposes a new scheduling algorithm that can be used to reduce the overall power consumption of a server while maintaining a high level of performance. Prototyping AMPs on a commercial 4-way SMP server, we show that on average 15.6 % energy savings and 6.1 % slowdown for the HT-disabled case, and 7.1 % energy savings and 4.8% slowdown for the HT-enabled case can be achieved across NAS and SPEC OpenMP applications. 1.