Performance-Energy Trade-off in Modern CMPs

Abstract

Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) are ubiquitous in all computing systems ranging from high-end servers to mobile devices. In these systems, energy consumption is a critical design constraint as it constitutes the most significant operating cost for computing clouds. Analogous to this, longer battery life continues to be an essential user concern in mobile devices. To optimize on power consumption, modern processors are designed with Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) support at the individual core as well as the uncore level. This allows fine-grained control of performance and energy. For an n core processor with m core and uncore frequency choices, the total DVFS configuration space is now m (n+1) (with the uncore accounting for the + 1). In addition to that, in CMPs, the performance-energy trade-off due to core/uncore frequency scaling concerning a single application cannot be determined independently as cores share critical resources like the last level cache (LLC) and the memory. Thus, unlike the uni-processor environment, the energy consumption of an application running on a CMP depends not only on its characteristics but also on those of its co-runners (applications running on other cores). The key objective of our work is to select a suitable core and uncore frequency that minimizes power consumption while limiting application performance degradation within certain pre-defined limits (can be termed as QoS requirements). The key contribution of our work is a learning-based model that is able to capture the interference due to shared cache, bus bandwidth, and memory bandwidth between applications running on multiple cores and predict near-optimal frequencies for core and uncore.