Formal online methods for voltage/frequency control in multiple clock domain microprocessors

Multiple Clock Domain (MCD) processors are a promising future alternative to today’s fully synchronous designs. Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) in an MCD processor has the extra flexibility to adjust the voltage and frequency in each domain independently. Most existing DVFS approaches are profile-based offline schemes which are mainly suitable for applications whose execution characteristics are constrained and repeatable. While some work has been published about online DVFS schemes, the prior approaches are typically heuristic-based. In this paper, we present an effective online DVFS scheme for an MCD processor which takes a formal analytic approach, is driven by dynamic workloads, and is suitable for all applications. In our approach, we model an MCD processor as a queue-domain network and the online DVFS as a feedback control problem with issue queue occupancies as feedback signals. A dynamic stochastic queuing model is first proposed and linearized through an ac...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Qiang Wu, Philo Juang, Margaret Martonosi, Douglas W. Clark
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2004, MCD Processor, Online Dvfs Schemes, Programming Languages, Profile-based Offline Schemes