System-level, thermal-aware, fully-loaded process scheduling

Processor power consumption produces significant heat and can result in higher average operating temperatures. High operating temperatures can lead to reduced reliability and at times thermal emergencies. Previous thermal-aware techniques use dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) or multithreaded or multicore process migration to reduce thermals. However, these methods do not gracefully handle scenarios where processors are fully loaded, i.e. there are no free threads or cores for process scheduling. We propose techniques to reduce processor temperature when processors are fully loaded. We use system-level compiler support and dynamic runtime instrumentation to identify the relative thermal intensity of processes. We implement a thermal-aware process scheduling algorithm that reduces processor thermals while maintaining application throughput. We favor "cool" processes by reducing time slice allocations for "hot" processes. Results indicate that our thermal-aware scheduling can reduce processor thermals by up to 3 degrees Celsius with little to no loss in application throughput.