Online work maximization under a peak temperature constraint

Increasing power densities and the high cost of low thermal resistance packages and cooling solutions make it impractical to design processors for worst-case temperature scenarios. As a result, packages and cooling solutions are designed for less than worst-case power densities and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is used to prevent dangerous on-chip temperatures at run time. Unfortunately, DVFS can cause unpredicted drops in performance (e.g., long response times). We propose and optimally solve the problem of thermally-constrained online work maximization for general-purpose computing systems on uniprocessors with discrete speed levels and non-negligible transition overheads. Simulation results show that our approach completes 47.7% on average and up to 68.0% more cycles than a na¨ıve policy. Categories and Subject Descriptors B.8 [Hardware]: Performance and Reliability General Terms Algorithms, Design, Performance, Theory

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ISLPED
• Authors: Thidapat Chantem, Xiaobo Sharon Hu, Robert P. Dick
• Keywords: Hardware, ISLPED 2009, Power Densities, Worst-case Power Densities, Worst-case Temperature Scenarios