Task Migration Algorithm to Reduce Temperature Imbalance Amongst Cores in Linux Based Multi-Core Processor Systems

Abstract

Multi-core architectures have recently emerged as the main design paradigm for current and future processors, however, the addition of multiple cores on the same chip and simultaneous execution of processes on these cores increases the temperature imbalance amongst cores and result in an increase in chip temperature, which in turn reduces the reliability of the processor. In this research project, the problem of temperature imbalance amongst cores in multi-core processor systems is addressed at the operating system level via task migration. The proposed task migration algorithm finds out the thermal contribution of individual task and performs the task migration based on this thermal contribution, in order to maintain temperature balance amongst cores. The proposed task migration algorithm is implemented in Linux operating system by modifying the source code written in C language. Different categories of processes (e.g. CPU bound, IO bound etc.) are executed from Phoronix Test Suite and Sysbench Benchmarks to test the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results for the existing task migration algorithm of Linux and the proposed task migration algorithm show that the proposed algorithm reduces the temperature imbalance amongst cores as compared to existing algorithm, without degrading the performance.