Thermal-Sustainable Power Budgeting for Dynamic Threading

Abstract

As technology scales, thermal management for multi-core architectures becomes a critical challenge due to increased power density and higher integration density. Existing power budgeting techniques focus on maximizing performance under a given power budget by optimizing the core dynamics. However, in multi-core era, a chip-wide power budget is not sufficient to ensure thermal constraints because the thermal sustainable power capacity varies with different threading strategies and core configurations. In this paper, we propose a model which estimates the thermal sustainable power capacity considering these two run-time factors. The model converts the thermal effect of threading strategies and core configurations into power capacity, which provides a context-based power budget for the power budgeting. Based on this model, we introduce a power budgeting framework aiming to optimize the performance within thermal constraints, named as TSocket. Compared to the chip-wide power budgeting solution, TSocket shows 19% of performance improvement for the PARSEC benchmarks by reducing thermal violations and providing extra power budget for performance improvement.