Temperature control of high-performance multi-core platforms using convex optimization

  • Authors:
  • Srinivasan Murali;Almir Mutapcic;David Atienza;Rajesh Gupta;Stephen Boyd;Luca Benini;Giovanni De Micheli

  • Affiliations:
  • LSI, EPFL, Switzerland;Stanford University;LSI, EPFL, Switzerland and Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Spain;UCSD;Stanford University;University of Bologna, Italy;LSI, EPFL, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

With technology advances, the number of cores integrated on a chip and their speed of operation is increasing. This, in turn is leading to a significant increase in chip temperature. Temperature gradients and hot-spots not only affect the performance of the system, but also lead to unreliable circuit operation and affect the life-time of the chip. Meeting the temperature constraints and reducing the hot-spots are critical for achieving reliable and efficient operation of complex multi-core systems. In this work, we present Pro-Temp, a convex optimization based method that pro-actively controls the temperature of the cores, while minimizing the power consumption and satisfying application performance constraints. The method guarantees that the temperature of the cores are below a user-defined threshold at all instances of operation, while also reducing the hot-spots. We perform experiments on several realistic multicore benchmarks, which show that the proposed method guarantees that the cores never exceed the maximum temperature limit, while matching the application performance requirements. We compare this to traditional methods, where we find several temperature violations during the operation of the system.