Reducing energy consumption using heterogeneous voltage frequency scaling of data-parallel applications for multicore systems

Abstract

This paper investigates the exploitation of heterogeneous DVFS (dynamic voltage frequency scaling) control for improving the energy efficiency of data-parallel applications on ccNUMA shared-memory systems. We propose to adjust the clock frequency individually for the appropriately selected groups of cores, taking into account the diversified costs of parallel computation. This paper aims to evaluate the proposed approach using two different data-parallel applications: solving the 3D diffusion problem, and MPDATA fluid dynamics application. As a result, we observe the energy-savings gains of up to 20 percentage points over the traditional homogeneous frequency scaling approach on the server with two 18-core Intel Xeon Gold 6240. Additionally, we confirm the effectiveness of our strategy using two 64-core AMD EPYC 7773X. This paper also introduces two pruning algorithms that help select the optimal heterogeneous DVFS setups taking into account the energy or performance profile of studied applications. Finally, the cost and efficiency of developed algorithms are verified and compared experimentally against the brute-force search.