Runtime energy management for many-core systems
Andre L. M. Martins, Anderson Camargo Sant'Ana, Fernando Moraes · 2016
The on-chip power dissipation limits the number of active transistors on recent CMOS technologies nodes. Designs have to adopt power techniques as power-gating and/or DVFS for respecting the restricted power budget. As a result of the limited power budget scenario, the management of many-core systems must support power techniques for improving the energy efficiency of such systems while avoiding power emergencies. Due to the complexity of developing a power management solution, researchers adopt high-level models which abstract characteristics of real systems. On the other hand, low-level proposals are not scalable or limited to small systems. This work proposes a Runtime Energy Management (REM) for many-core systems using fine-grain DVFS as the primary power control policy. Scalability is ensured by a distributed management architecture, responsible for power monitoring and actuation on individual cores to respect the power constraints. The proposal is validated in a many-core system, described in a clock-cycle accurate model, running real applications. Results show that the proposed REM reduces energy while guaranteeing scalability.