MAximum Multicore POwer (MAMPO) — An automatic multithreaded synthetic power virus generation framework for multicore systems

The practically attainable worst case power consumption for a computer system is a significant design parameter and it is a very tedious process to determine it by manually writing high power consuming code snippets called power viruses. Previous research efforts towards automating the power virus generation process are all limited to the single core processors and are not effective when applied to multicore parallel systems as the components like the interconnection network, shared caches, DRAM and coherence directory also contribute significantly to the power consumption of a multicore parallel system. In this paper we propose MAximum Multicore POwer (MAMPO), which is the pioneer attempt towards a framework to automatically generate a multithreaded power virus for a given multicore parallel system configuration. We show that the the power viruses generated by MAMPO consume 40% to 89% more power than running multiple copies of single-core power viruses like MPrime torture test and the most recent published previous work called SYMPO on 3 different parallel multicore system configurations. The superiority of the MAMPO viruses are also shown by comparing the power consumption of the MAMPO viruses with that of the workloads in the PARSEC benchmark suite and that of the commercial Java benchmark SPECjbb. The MAMPO viruses consume 45% to 98% more power than that of the average power consumption of the workloads in the PARSEC suite and 41% to 56% more power than that of the commercial benchmark SPECjbb.