Online Peak Power and Maximum Temperature Management in Multi-core Mixed-Criticality Embedded Systems

Abstract

In this work, we address peak power and maximum temperature in multi-core Mixed-Criticality (MC) systems. In these systems, a rise in peak power consumption may generate more heat beyond the cooling capacity. Additionally, the reliability and timeliness of MC systems may be affected due to excessive temperature. Therefore, managing peak power consumption has become imperative in multi-core MC systems. In this regard, we propose an online peak power management heuristic for multi-core MC systems. This heuristic reduces the peak power consumption of the system as much as possible during runtime by exploiting dynamic slack and Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). Specifically, our approach examines multiple tasks ahead to determine the most appropriate one for slack assignment instead of just one task as in the literature. The selection is based on the impact of the tasks on peak power and temperature of the system. The DVFS is then applied to that task to reduce the system peak power and maximum temperature. Further, a re-mapping technique is proposed to further improve the results. Our experimental results show that our heuristic achieves up to 18.2% reduction in system peak power consumption and 8.1% reduction in maximum temperature compared to an existing method. The inherent energy consumption is also reduced by up to 50%.