A Survey of Prediction and Classification Techniques in Multicore Processor Systems

In multicore processor systems, being able to accurately predict the future provides new optimization opportunities, which otherwise could not be exploited. For example, an oracle able to predict a certain application\u27s behavior running on a smart phone could direct the power manager to switch to appropriate dynamic voltage and frequency scaling modes that would guarantee minimum levels of desired performance while saving energy consumption and thereby prolonging battery life. Using predictions enables systems to become proactive rather than continue to operate in a reactive manner. This prediction-based proactive approach has become increasingly popular in the design and optimization of integrated circuits and of multicore processor systems. Prediction transforms from simple forecasting to sophisticated machine learning based prediction and classification that learns from existing data, employs data mining, and predicts future behavior. This can be exploited by novel optimization techniques that can span across all layers of the computing stack. In this survey paper, we present a discussion of the most popular techniques on prediction and classification in the general context of computing systems with emphasis on multicore processors. The paper is far from comprehensive, but, it will help the reader interested in employing prediction in optimization of multicore processor systems

Inter-cluster Thread-to-core Mapping and DVFS on Heterogeneous Multi-cores

Heterogeneous multi-core platforms that contain different types of cores, organized as clusters, are emerging, e.g. ARM's big.LITTLE architecture. These platforms often need to deal with multiple applications, having different performance requirements, executing concurrently. This leads to generation of varying and mixed workloads (e.g. compute and memory intensive) due to resource sharing. Run-time management is required for adapting to such performance requirements and workload variabilities and to achieve energy efficiency. Moreover, the management becomes challenging when the applications are multi-threaded and the heterogeneity needs to be exploited. The existing run-time management approaches do not efficiently exploit cores situated in different clusters simultaneously (referred to as inter-cluster exploitation) and DVFS potential of cores, which is the aim of this paper. Such exploitation might help to satisfy the performance requirement while achieving energy savings at the same time. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a run-time management approach that first selects thread-to-core mapping based on the performance requirements and resource availability. Then, it applies online adaptation by adjusting the voltage-frequency (V-f) levels to achieve energy optimization, without trading-off application performance. For thread-to-core mapping, offline profiled results are used, which contain performance and energy characteristics of applications when executed on the heterogeneous platform by using different types of cores in various possible combinations. For an application, thread-to-core mapping process defines the number of used cores and their type, which are situated in different clusters. The online adaptation process classifies the inherent workload characteristics of concurrently executing applications, incurring a lower overhead than existing learning-based approaches as demonstrated in this paper. The classification of workload is performed using the metric Memory Reads Per Instruction (MRPI). The adaptation process pro-actively selects an appropriate V-f pair for a predicted workload. Subsequently, it monitors the workload prediction error and performance loss, quantified by instructions per second (IPS), and adjusts the chosen V-f to compensate. We validate the proposed run-time management approach on a hardware platform, the Odroid-XU3, with various combinations of multi-threaded applications from PARSEC and SPLASH benchmarks. Results show an average improvement in energy efficiency up to 33% compared to existing approaches while meeting the performance requirements

Learning-based run-time power and energy management of multi/many-core systems: current and future trends

Multi/Many-core systems are prevalent in several application domains targeting different scales of computing such as embedded and cloud computing. These systems are able to fulfil the everincreasing performance requirements by exploiting their parallel processing capabilities. However, effective power/energy management is required during system operations due to several reasons such as to increase the operational time of battery operated systems, reduce the energy cost of datacenters, and improve thermal efficiency and reliability. This article provides an extensive survey of learning-based run-time power/energy management approaches. The survey includes a taxonomy of the learning-based approaches. These approaches perform design-time and/or run-time power/energy management by employing some learning principles such as reinforcement learning. The survey also highlights the trends followed by the learning-based run-time power management approaches, their upcoming trends and open research challenges

Design Space Exploration and Resource Management of Multi/Many-Core Systems

The increasing demand of processing a higher number of applications and related data on computing platforms has resulted in reliance on multi-/many-core chips as they facilitate parallel processing. However, there is a desire for these platforms to be energy-efficient and reliable, and they need to perform secure computations for the interest of the whole community. This book provides perspectives on the aforementioned aspects from leading researchers in terms of state-of-the-art contributions and upcoming trends

An Intelligent Framework for Energy-Aware Mobile Computing Subject to Stochastic System Dynamics

abstract: User satisfaction is pivotal to the success of mobile applications. At the same time, it is imperative to maximize the energy efficiency of the mobile device to ensure optimal usage of the limited energy source available to mobile devices while maintaining the necessary levels of user satisfaction. However, this is complicated due to user interactions, numerous shared resources, and network conditions that produce substantial uncertainty to the mobile device's performance and power characteristics. In this dissertation, a new approach is presented to characterize and control mobile devices that accurately models these uncertainties. The proposed modeling framework is a completely data-driven approach to predicting power and performance. The approach makes no assumptions on the distributions of the underlying sources of uncertainty and is capable of predicting power and performance with over 93% accuracy. Using this data-driven prediction framework, a closed-loop solution to the DEM problem is derived to maximize the energy efficiency of the mobile device subject to various thermal, reliability and deadline constraints. The design of the controller imposes minimal operational overhead and is able to tune the performance and power prediction models to changing system conditions. The proposed controller is implemented on a real mobile platform, the Google Pixel smartphone, and demonstrates a 19% improvement in energy efficiency over the standard frequency governor implemented on all Android devices.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Engineering 201

System-level power management using online machine learning for prediction and adaptation

Nowadays embedded devices have the need to be portable, battery powered and high performance. This need for high performance makes power management a matter of critical priority. Power management algorithms exist, but most of the approaches focus on an energy-performance trade-off oblivious to the applications running on the system. Others are application-specific and their solution cannot be applied to other applications.This work proposes Shepherd, a cross-layer runtime management system for reduction of energy consumption whilst offering soft real-time performance. It is cross-layer because it takes the performance requirements from the application, and learns to adjust the power management knobs to provide the expected performance at the minimum cost of energy. Shepherd is implemented as a Linux governor running at OS level, this layer offers a low-overhead interface to change the CPU voltage and frequency dynamically.As opposed to the reactive behaviour of Linux Governors, Shepherd adapts to the application-specific performance requirements dynamically, and proactively selects the power state that fulfils these requirements while consuming the least power. Proactiveness is achieved by using AEWMA for adapting to the upcoming workload. These adaptations are facilitated using a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, that once it learns the optimal decisions it starts exploiting them. This work enables Shepherd to work with different applications. A programming framework was designed to allow programmers to develop their applications to be power-aware, by enabling them to send their performance requirements and annotations to Shepherd and provide the cross-layer soft real-time performance desired.Shepherd is implemented within the Linux Kernel 3.7.10, interfacing with the application and hardware to select an appropriate voltage-frequency control for the executing application. The performance of Shepherd is demonstrated on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor. Experiments conducted with multimedia applications demonstrate that Shepherd minimises energy consumption by up to 30% against existing Governors. Also, the framework has been used to adapt example applications to work with Shepherd, achieving 60% energy savings compared to the existing approaches

ADAPTIVE POWER MANAGEMENT FOR COMPUTERS AND MOBILE DEVICES

Power consumption has become a major concern in the design of computing systems today. High power consumption increases cooling cost, degrades the system reliability and also reduces the battery life in portable devices. Modern computing/communication devices support multiple power modes which enable power and performance tradeoff. Dynamic power management (DPM), dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), and dynamic task migration for workload consolidation are system level power reduction techniques widely used during runtime. In the first part of the dissertation, we concentrate on the dynamic power management of the personal computer and server platform where the DPM, DVFS and task migrations techniques are proved to be highly effective. A hierarchical energy management framework is assumed, where task migration is applied at the upper level to improve server utilization and energy efficiency, and DPM/DVFS is applied at the lower level to manage the power mode of individual processor. This work focuses on estimating the performance impact of workload consolidation and searching for optimal DPM/DVFS that adapts to the changing workload. Machine learning based modeling and reinforcement learning based policy optimization techniques are investigated. Mobile computing has been weaved into everyday lives to a great extend in recent years. Compared to traditional personal computer and server environment, the mobile computing environment is obviously more context-rich and the usage of mobile computing device is clearly imprinted with user\u27s personal signature. The ability to learn such signature enables immense potential in workload prediction and energy or battery life management. In the second part of the dissertation, we present two mobile device power management techniques which take advantage of the context-rich characteristics of mobile platform and make adaptive energy management decisions based on different user behavior. We firstly investigate the user battery usage behavior modeling and apply the model directly for battery energy management. The first technique aims at maximizing the quality of service (QoS) while keeping the risk of battery depletion below a given threshold. The second technique is an user-aware streaming strategies for energy efficient smartphone video playback applications (e.g. YouTube) that minimizes the sleep and wake penalty of cellular module and at the same time avoid the energy waste from excessive downloading. Runtime power and thermal management has attracted substantial interests in multi-core distributed embedded systems. Fast performance evaluation is an essential step in the research of distributed power and thermal management. In last part of the dissertation, we present an FPGA based emulator of multi-core distributed embedded system designed to support the research in runtime power/thermal management. Hardware and software supports are provided to carry out basic power/thermal management actions including inter-core or inter-FPGA communications, runtime temperature monitoring and dynamic frequency scaling

Improving the Efficiency of Energy Harvesting Embedded System

In the past decade, mobile embedded systems, such as cell phones and tablets have infiltrated and dramatically transformed our life. The computation power, storage capacity and data communication speed of mobile devices have increases tremendously, and they have been used for more critical applications with intensive computation/communication. As a result, the battery lifetime becomes increasingly important and tends to be one of the key considerations for the consumers. Researches have been carried out to improve the efficiency of the lithium ion battery, which is a specific member in the more general Electrical Energy Storage (EES) family and is widely used in mobile systems, as well as the efficiency of other electrical energy storage systems such as supercapacitor, lead acid battery, and nickel–hydrogen battery etc. Previous studies show that hybrid electrical energy storage (HEES), which is a mixture of different EES technologies, gives the best performance. On the other hand, the Energy Harvesting (EH) technique has the potential to solve the problem once and for all by providing green and semi-permanent supply of energy to the embedded systems. However, the harvesting power must submit to the uncertainty of the environment and the variation of the weather. A stable and consistent power supply cannot always be guaranteed. The limited lifetime of the EES system and the unstableness of the EH system can be overcome by combining these two together to an energy harvesting embedded system and making them work cooperatively. In an energy harvesting embedded systems, if the harvested power is sufficient for the workload, extra power can be stored in the EES element; if the harvested power is short, the energy stored in the EES bank can be used to support the load demand. How much energy can be stored in the charging phase and how long the EES bank lifetime will be are affected by many factors including the efficiency of the energy harvesting module, the input/output voltage of the DC-DC converters, the status of the EES elements, and the characteristics of the workload. In this thesis, when the harvesting energy is abundant, our goal is to store as much surplus energy as possible in the EES bank under the variation of the harvesting power and the workload power. We investigate the impact of workload scheduling and Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) of the embedded system on the energy efficiency of the EES bank in the charging phase. We propose a fast heuristic algorithm to minimize the energy overhead on the DC-DC converter while satisfying the timing constraints of the embedded workload and maximizing the energy stored in the HEES system. The proposed algorithm improves the efficiency of charging and discharging in an energy harvesting embedded system. On the other hand, when the harvesting rate is low, workload power consumption is supplied by the EES bank. In this case, we try to minimize the energy consumption on the embedded system to extend its EES bank life. In this thesis, we consider the scenario when workload has uncertainties and is running on a heterogeneous multi-core system. The workload variation is represented by the selection of conditional branches which activate or deactivate a set of instructions belonging to a task. We employ both task scheduling and DVFS techniques for energy optimization. Our scheduling algorithm considers the statistical information of the workload to minimize the mean power consumption of the application while satisfying a hard deadline constraint. The proposed DVFS algorithm has pseudo linear complexity and achieves comparable energy reduction as the solutions found by mathematical programming. Due to its capability of slack reclaiming, our DVFS technique is less sensitive to small change in hardware or workload and works more robustly than other techniques without slack reclaiming