Power-aware modulo scheduling for high-performance VLIW processors

For high-performance processors, the step power and peak power, which are closely related to the chip reliability, are important design constraints, often more than the average power. In VLIW processors where a single instruction may contain a variable number of operations, the step power and peak power vary significantly depending on the parallel schedule generated by a parallelizing compiler. In this paper, we propose a power-aware modulo scheduling algorithm for high-performance VLIW processors. The proposed algorithm reduces both the step power and peak power by producing a more balanced parallel schedule while not compromising performance. Experimental results show that the proposed scheduling technique significantly improves the power characteristics of high-performance processors over an existing power-unaware modulo scheduling technique.