Dynamic power management through adaptive task scheduling for multi-threaded SIMD processors

Power management is one of the most important issues in computer architecture today. Devices often operate on the edge of their thermal envelope and system designers must balance the power consumption of various system components in order to ensure safe operation. This paper proposes an adaptive scheduler for a multi-threaded SIMD processor which is able to trade performance for power consumption in order to stay within a given power budget. By moving threads between processor cores, the scheduler is able to create more opportunity for the use of aggressive power management techniques like clock gating. Evaluation shows the proposed algorithm enables more power savings than frequency scaling for various synthetic workloads.