Resource area dilation to reduce power density in throughput servers

Throughput servers using simultaneous multithreaded (SMT) processors are becoming an important paradigm with products such as Sun's Niagara and IBM Power5. Unfortunately, throughput-computing via SMT aggravates power-density problems because SMT increases utilization, decreasing cooling opportunities for overheated resources. Existing power density techniques are: slowing computation and lowering supply voltage, which is likely infeasible in future technologies; stopping computation to reduce heating, which substantially degrades performance; or migrating computation to spare resources, which adds complexity; or requiring underutilized resources, which may not be available in an SMT-based throughput server. An alternative is to increase the area of heat-prone resources at design time. We propose the concept of dilation where a resource’s circuit components are spread over an area larger than required for correct logic. Increasing area allows the resource to be utilized more wit...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISLPED
• Authors: Michael D. Powell, T. N. Vijaykumar
• Keywords: Hardware, ISLPED 2007, Resource Area Dilation, SMT-based Throughput, Throughput Server