Thread Voting DVFS for Manycore NoCs

Abstract

We present a thread-voting DVFS technique for manycore networks-on-chip (NoCs). This technique has two remarkable features which differentiate from conventional NoC DVFS schemes. (1) Not only network-level but also thread-level runtime performance indicatives are used to guide DVFS decisions. (2) To resolve multiple perhaps conflicting performance indicatives from many cores, it allows each thread to “vote” for a V/F level in its own performance interest, and a region-based V/F controller makes dynamic per-region V/F decision according to the major vote. We evaluate our technique on a 64-core CMP in full-system simulation environment GEM5 with both PARSEC and SPEC OMP2012 benchmarks. Compared to a network metric (router buffer occupancy) based approach, it can improve the network energy efficacy measured in MPPJ (million packets per joule) by up to 22 percent for PARSEC and 20 percent for SPEC OMP2012, and the system energy efficacy measured in MIPJ (million instructions per joule) by up to 35 percent for PARSEC and 33 percent for SPEC OMP2012.