Thermal characterization of next-generation workloads on heterogeneous MPSoCs

Next-generation High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications need to tackle outstanding computational complexity while meeting latency and Quality-of-Service constraints. Heterogeneous Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs), equipped with a mix of general-purpose cores and reconfigurable fabric for custom acceleration of computational blocks, are key in providing the flexibility to meet the requirements of next-generation HPC. However, heterogeneity brings new challenges to efficient chip thermal management. In this context, accurate and fast thermal simulators are becoming crucial to understand and exploit the trade-offs brought by heterogeneous MPSoCs. In this paper, we first thermally characterize a next-generation HPC workload, the online video transcoding application, using a highly-accurate Infra-Red (IR) microscope. Second, we extend the 3D-ICE thermal simulation tool with a new generic heat spreader model capable of accurately reproducing package surface temperature, with an average error of 6.8% for the hot spots of the chip. Our model is used to characterize the thermal behaviour of the online transcoding application when running on a heterogeneous MPSoC. Moreover, by using our detailed thermal system characterization we are able to explore different application mappings as well as the thermal limits of such heterogeneous platforms.