Scaling and packing on a chip multiprocessor
Conference Paper
Power management is critical in server and high-performance computing environments as well as in mobile computing. Many mechanisms have been developed over recent years to support a wide a variety of power management techniques. In particular, general purpose microprocessors now support dynamically modifying the power-performance state through voltage and frequency changes. This development spawned a very important area of this research in dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). On the other hand, in a multiprocessor environment one can perform power management by offlining and idling processors when computational demand is low in a technique called CPU packing. This paper examines the effect of combining voltage and frequency scaling and CPU packing in a multiprocessor. Furthermore, it examines DVFS on a chip multiprocessor in which multiple processor cores are placed on a single die. This paper shows that in general one should use DVFS first, then CPU packing. Furthermore, we find that the effectiveness of CPU packing is application-dependent: commercial workloads (e.g. Apache) with periods of low utilization can reduce power by as much as 19% via packing, while the improvement to HPC workloads ranges from small to negligible. © 2007 IEEE.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- Freeh, VW; Bletsch, TK; Rawson, FL
Published Date
- September 24, 2007
Published In
- Proceedings 21st International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, Ipdps 2007; Abstracts and Cd Rom
International Standard Book Number 10 (ISBN-10)
- 1424409101
International Standard Book Number 13 (ISBN-13)
- 9781424409105
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1109/IPDPS.2007.370539
Citation Source
- Scopus