Agent-based distributed power management for Kilo-core processors: Special Session: “Keeping Kilo-core chips cool: New directions and emerging solutions”

Power management for Kilo-core processors have become an intricate problem due to the scalability issues and mixed-workloads of massively multi-threaded applications. This paper highlights the power related issues in Kilo-core processors and presents two emerging trends towards agent-based distributed and self-adaptive power management for Kilo-core processors. Agent-based power management allows applications to autonomously control the power states of their resources while operate efficiently as a whole to improve the overall system's energy efficiency. The first approach based on our concept of virtual power gating that allows applications to temporarily reserve their resources to locally optimize for power efficiency. The second approach is game-theoretic power management to achieve fair resource allocations while maximizing the energy efficiency. We present results for scalability and energy efficiency.