TAPE: Thermal-aware agent-based power econom multi/many-core architectures

A growing challenge in embedded system design is coping with increasing power densities resulting from packing more and more transistors onto a small die area, which in turn transform into thermal hotspots. In the current late silicon era silicon structures have become more susceptible to transient faults and aging effects resulting from these thermal hotspots. In this paper we present an agent-based power distribution approach (TAPE) which aims to balance the power consumption of a multi/many-core architecture in a pro-active manner. By further taking the system's thermal state into consideration when distributing the power throughout the chip, TAPE is able to noticeably reduce the peak temperature. In our simulation we provide a fair comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches HRTM [19] and PDTM [9] using the MiBench benchmark suite [18]. When running multiple applications simultaneously on a multi/many-core architecture, we are able to achieve an 11.23% decrease in peak temperature compared to the approach that uses no thermal management [14]. At the same time we reduce the execution time (i.e. we increase the performance of the applications) by 44.2% and reduce the energy consumption by 44.4% compared to PDTM [9]. We also show that our approach exhibits higher scalability, requiring 11.9 times less communication overhead in an architecture with 96 cores compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.3 [Special-Purpose and Application-Based Systems]: Real-time and embedded systems General Terms: Algorithms