Bubble budgeting: throughput optimization for dynamic workloads by exploiting dark cores in many core systems

All the cores of a many-core chip cannot be active at the same time, due to reasons like low CPU utilization in server systems and limited power budget in dark silicon era. These free cores (referred to as bubbles) can be placed near active cores for heat dissipation so that the active cores can run at a higher frequency level, boosting the performance of applications that run on active cores. Budgeting inactive cores (bubbles) to applications to boost performance has the following three challenges. First, the number of bubbles varies due to open workloads. Second, communication distance increases when a bubble is inserted between two communicating tasks (a task is a thread or process of a parallel application), leading to performance degradation. Third, budgeting too many bubbles as coolers to running applications leads to insufficient cores for future applications. In order to address these challenges, in this paper, a bubble budgeting scheme is proposed to budget free cores to each application so as to optimize the throughput of the whole system. Throughput of the system depends on the execution time of each application and the waiting time incurred for newly arrived applications. Essentially, the proposed algorithm determines the number and locations of bubbles to optimize the performance and waiting time of each application, followed by tasks of each application being mapped to a core region. A Rollout algorithm is used to budget power to the cores as the last step. Experiments show that our approach achieves 50 percent higher throughput when compared to state-of-the-art thermal-aware runtime task mapping approaches. The runtime overhead of the proposed algorithm is in the order of 1M cycles, making it an efficient runtime task management method for large-scale many-core systems

A survey of system level power management schemes in the dark-silicon era for many-core architectures

Power consumption in Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology has escalated to a point that only a fractional part of many-core chips can be powered-on at a time. Fortunately, this fraction can be increased at the expense of performance through the dark-silicon solution. However, with many-core integration set to be heading towards its thousands, power consumption and temperature increases per time, meaning the number of active nodes must be reduced drastically. Therefore, optimized techniques are demanded for continuous advancement in technology. Existing efforts try to overcome this challenge by activating nodes from different parts of the chip at the expense of communication latency. Other efforts on the other hand employ run-time power management techniques to manage the power performance of the cores trading-off performance for power. We found out that, for a significant amount of power to saved and high temperature to be avoided, focus should be on reducing the power consumption of all the on-chip components. Especially, the memory hierarchy and the interconnect. Power consumption can be minimized by, reducing the size of high leakage power dissipating elements, turning-off idle resources and integrating power saving materials

Adaptive Knobs for Resource Efficient Computing

Performance demands of emerging domains such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and vision, Internet-of-things etc., continue to grow. Meeting such requirements on modern multi/many core systems with higher power densities, fixed power and energy budgets, and thermal constraints exacerbates the run-time management challenge. This leaves an open problem on extracting the required performance within the power and energy limits, while also ensuring thermal safety. Existing architectural solutions including asymmetric and heterogeneous cores and custom acceleration improve performance-per-watt in specific design time and static scenarios. However, satisfying applications’ performance requirements under dynamic and unknown workload scenarios subject to varying system dynamics of power, temperature and energy requires intelligent run-time management. Adaptive strategies are necessary for maximizing resource efficiency, considering i) diverse requirements and characteristics of concurrent applications, ii) dynamic workload variation, iii) core-level heterogeneity and iv) power, thermal and energy constraints. This dissertation proposes such adaptive techniques for efficient run-time resource management to maximize performance within fixed budgets under unknown and dynamic workload scenarios. Resource management strategies proposed in this dissertation comprehensively consider application and workload characteristics and variable effect of power actuation on performance for pro-active and appropriate allocation decisions. Specific contributions include i) run-time mapping approach to improve power budgets for higher throughput, ii) thermal aware performance boosting for efficient utilization of power budget and higher performance, iii) approximation as a run-time knob exploiting accuracy performance trade-offs for maximizing performance under power caps at minimal loss of accuracy and iv) co-ordinated approximation for heterogeneous systems through joint actuation of dynamic approximation and power knobs for performance guarantees with minimal power consumption. The approaches presented in this dissertation focus on adapting existing mapping techniques, performance boosting strategies, software and dynamic approximations to meet the performance requirements, simultaneously considering system constraints. The proposed strategies are compared against relevant state-of-the-art run-time management frameworks to qualitatively evaluate their efficacy

Power, Energy, and Thermal Management for Clustered Manycores

Efficient and effective system-level power, energy, and thermal management are very important issues in modern computing systems, for which clustered architectures with multiple voltage islands are an expected compromise between global and per-core DVFS. In this dissertation, we focus on two of the most relevant problems for such architectures, specifically, optimizing performance under power/thermal constraints, and minimizing energy under performance constraints

Resource-aware scheduling for 2D/3D multi-/many-core processor-memory systems

This dissertation addresses the complexities of 2D/3D multi-/many-core processor-memory systems, focusing on two key areas: enhancing timing predictability in real-time multi-core processors and optimizing performance within thermal constraints. The integration of an increasing number of transistors into compact chip designs, while boosting computational capacity, presents challenges in resource contention and thermal management. The first part of the thesis improves timing predictability. We enhance shared cache interference analysis for set-associative caches, advancing the calculation of Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET). This development enables accurate assessment of cache interference and the effectiveness of partitioned schedulers in real-world scenarios. We introduce TCPS, a novel task and cache-aware partitioned scheduler that optimizes cache partitioning based on task-specific WCET sensitivity, leading to improved schedulability and predictability. Our research explores various cache and scheduling configurations, providing insights into their performance trade-offs. The second part focuses on thermal management in 2D/3D many-core systems. Recognizing the limitations of Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) in S-NUCA many-core processors, we propose synchronous thread migrations as a thermal management strategy. This approach culminates in the HotPotato scheduler, which balances performance and thermal safety. We also introduce 3D-TTP, a transient temperature-aware power budgeting strategy for 3D-stacked systems, reducing the need for Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) activation. Finally, we present 3QUTM, a novel method for 3D-stacked systems that combines core DVFS and memory bank Low Power Modes with a learning algorithm, optimizing response times within thermal limits. This research contributes significantly to enhancing performance and thermal management in advanced processor-memory systems

A Survey of Fault-Tolerance Techniques for Embedded Systems from the Perspective of Power, Energy, and Thermal Issues

The relentless technology scaling has provided a significant increase in processor performance, but on the other hand, it has led to adverse impacts on system reliability. In particular, technology scaling increases the processor susceptibility to radiation-induced transient faults. Moreover, technology scaling with the discontinuation of Dennard scaling increases the power densities, thereby temperatures, on the chip. High temperature, in turn, accelerates transistor aging mechanisms, which may ultimately lead to permanent faults on the chip. To assure a reliable system operation, despite these potential reliability concerns, fault-tolerance techniques have emerged. Specifically, fault-tolerance techniques employ some kind of redundancies to satisfy specific reliability requirements. However, the integration of fault-tolerance techniques into real-time embedded systems complicates preserving timing constraints. As a remedy, many task mapping/scheduling policies have been proposed to consider the integration of fault-tolerance techniques and enforce both timing and reliability guarantees for real-time embedded systems. More advanced techniques aim additionally at minimizing power and energy while at the same time satisfying timing and reliability constraints. Recently, some scheduling techniques have started to tackle a new challenge, which is the temperature increase induced by employing fault-tolerance techniques. These emerging techniques aim at satisfying temperature constraints besides timing and reliability constraints. This paper provides an in-depth survey of the emerging research efforts that exploit fault-tolerance techniques while considering timing, power/energy, and temperature from the real-time embedded systems’ design perspective. In particular, the task mapping/scheduling policies for fault-tolerance real-time embedded systems are reviewed and classified according to their considered goals and constraints. Moreover, the employed fault-tolerance techniques, application models, and hardware models are considered as additional dimensions of the presented classification. Lastly, this survey gives deep insights into the main achievements and shortcomings of the existing approaches and highlights the most promising ones

Thermal Management for Dependable On-Chip Systems

This thesis addresses the dependability issues in on-chip systems from a thermal perspective. This includes an explanation and analysis of models to show the relationship between dependability and tempature. Additionally, multiple novel methods for on-chip thermal management are introduced aiming to optimize thermal properties. Analysis of the methods is done through simulation and through infrared thermal camera measurements

Dynamic Allocation/Reallocation of Dark Cores in Many-Core Systems for Improved System Performance

A significant number of processing cores in any many-core systems nowadays and likely in the future have to be switched off or forced to be idle to become dark cores, in light of ever increasing power density and chip temperature. Although these dark cores cannot make direct contributions to the chip\u27s throughput, they can still be allocated to applications currently running in the system for the sole purpose of heat dissipation enabled by the temperature gradient between the active and dark cores. However, allocating dark cores to applications tends to add extra waiting time to applications yet to be launched, which in return can have adverse implications on the overall system performance. Another big issue related to dark core allocation stems from the fact that application characteristics are prone to undergo rapid changes at runtime, making a fixed dark core allocation scheme less desirable. In this paper, a runtime dark core allocation and dynamic adjustment scheme is thus proposed. Built upon a dynamic programming network (DPN) framework, the proposed scheme attempts to optimize the performance of currently running applications and simultaneously reduce waiting times of incoming applications by taking into account both thermal issues and geometric shapes of regions formed by the active/dark cores. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves an average of 61% higher throughput than the two state-of-the-art thermal-aware runtime task mapping approaches, making it the runtime resource management of choice in many-core systems

AMA: An Ageing Task Migration Aware for High Performance Computing

The Dark-Silicon challenge poses a design problem for future many-core systems. As a result of this, several techniques have been introduced to improve the number of processing elements that can be powered on. One of the techniques employed by many is Task Migration. In this paper, An Ageing Task Migration Aware for High-Performance Computing (AMA) is proposed to improve the lifetime of nodes. The proposed method determines which clusters applications are mapped to and, migrates high-demand tasks amongst nodes to improve the lifetime at every epoch. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques by more than 10%