Software thermal management of dram memory for multicore systems

Thermal management of DRAM memory has become a critical issue for server systems. We have done, to our best knowledge, the first study of software thermal management for memory subsystem on real machines. Two recently proposed DTM (Dynamic Thermal Management) policies have been improved and implemented in Linux OS and evaluated on two multicore servers, a Dell PowerEdge 1950 server and a customized Intel SR1500AL server testbed. The experimental results first confirm that a systemlevel memory DTM policy may significantly improve system performance and power efficiency, compared with existing memory bandwidth throttling scheme. A policy called DTM-ACG (Adaptive Core Gating) shows performance improvement comparable to that reported previously. The average performance improvements are 13.3% and 7.2% on the PowerEdge 1950 and the SR1500AL (vs. 16.3% from the previous simulation-based study), respectively. We also have surprising findings that reveal the weakness of the previous study: the...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Jiang Lin, Hongzhong Zheng, Zhichun Zhu, Eugene Gorbatov, Howard David, Zhao Zhang
• Keywords: Hardware, Memory Dtm Policy, Performance Improvements, SIGMETRICS 2008, Thermal Management