1. A Fast Heuristic for Improving the Energy Efficiency of Asymmetric VFI-Based Manycore Systems
- Author
-
Shervin Hajiamini, Behrooz Shirazi, and Hongbo Dong
- Subjects
Control and Optimization ,Degree (graph theory) ,Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment ,Heuristic (computer science) ,Computer science ,Sorting ,Workload ,Parallel computing ,Computational Theory and Mathematics ,Hardware and Architecture ,Overhead (computing) ,Cluster analysis ,Software ,Energy (signal processing) ,Efficient energy use - Abstract
Voltage/Frequency Islands (VFIs) are practically used in multicore systems. VFIs cluster cores that share the same Voltage/Frequency (V/F) level for the entire application runtime. Using VFIs, switching V/F levels has less overhead per-core while saving more energy in exchange for tolerable execution delay. This paper targets the well-known K-means algorithm for clustering cores, where each cluster contains cores with similar computational workloads across applications phases. K-means produces sub-optimal clusters when cores workloads do not have the same variation across all phases. Furthermore, the workload variations require running a VFI with a different V/F level per-phase. This paper presents a fast heuristic that facilitates clustering by sorting computational workloads per-phase before applying K-means. The VFIs V/F levels are dynamically adjusted to meet energy budget constraints. This framework provides a guideline for users to choose a number of clusters that satisfies system configurations and energy efficiency preferences. Three parameters are evaluated to represent the computational workloads: utilization, Instruction-Per-Cycle (IPC), and execution time. For an application with highly varying workload, execution time achieves 52 and 65% more energy efficiency compared to utilization and IPC, respectively. Results show that the degree of workload variations for different applications impacts changing or fixing VFIs V/F levels.
- Published
- 2022
- Full Text
- View/download PDF