Scalable hardware-based power management for many-core systems

Due to high levels integration, the design of many-core systems becomes increasingly challenging. Runtime dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is an effective method in managing the power based on performance requirements in the presence of workload variations. This paper presents an on-line scalable hardware-based dynamic voltage frequency selection algorithm, by using both FIFO occupancy and stall information between processors. To demonstrate the proposed solution, two real application benchmarks are tested on a many-core globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) platform. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve near-optimal power saving under performance constraints.