Thread motion: fine-grained power management for multi-core systems

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is a commonly-used powermanagement scheme that dynamically adjusts power and performance to the time-varying needs of running programs. Unfortunately, conventional DVFS, relying on off-chip regulators, faces limitations in terms of temporal granularity and high costs when considered for future multi-core systems. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents thread motion (TM), a fine-grained power-management scheme for chip multiprocessors (CMPs). Instead of incurring the high cost of changing the voltage and frequency of different cores, TM enables rapid movement of threads to adapt the timevarying computing needs of running applications to a mixture of cores with fixed but different power/performance levels. Results show that for the same power budget, two voltage/frequency levels are sufficient to provide performance gains commensurate to idealized scenarios using per-core voltage control. Thread motion extends workload-based pow...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Krishna K. Rangan, Gu-Yeon Wei, David Brooks
• Keywords: Hardware, ISCA 2009, Power Budget, Thread Motion, Voltage