The emergence of power as a first-class design constraint has fueled the proposal of a growing number of optimization techniques, seeking the best tradeoff to reach the maximum energy efficiency. Effective adaptation strategies depend critically on the monitoring method as an incorrect assessment of the system's state will result in poor decision making. Yet it is indeed a fundamental issue: how to get a precise estimation of the system's state, and especially in a cost-effective way? We address this question for the self-observation of the power consumption. We develop a method that combines several data mining algorithms to monitor the toggling activity on a few relevant signals selected at the register transfer-level. Our approach is based on a generic flow that is able to produce a power model for any register transfer level (RTL) circuit on any technology. This contribution is evaluated on a system on chip RTL model implemented on an field-programmable gate array technology. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the accuracy of analog power sensors (error lower than 1%) at a finer granularity and in a cost-effective way. Index Terms-Data mining, design-time method, fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA), power modeling, register transfer-level, system on chip (SoC) monitoring.
Dynamic Thermal and Power Management methods require efficient monitoring techniques. Based on a set of data collected by sensors, embedded models estimate online the power consumption: this task is a real challenge, since models must be both accurate and low cost, but they also have to be robust to variations. In this paper, we investigate a self-aware approach using the performance events and the external temperature. We present a solution (PESel) for the selection of the relevant information. This method is two times faster than existing solutions and provides better results compared to related works. The power models achieve a 96% accuracy with a temporal resolution of 100 ms, and negligible performance/energy overheads (less than 1%). Moreover, we show that our estimations are not sensitive to external temperature variations.
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