Processor speed control with thermal constraints

  • Authors:

  • Almir Mutapcic;Stephen Boyd;Srinivasan Murali;David Atienza;Giovanni De Micheli;Rajesh Gupta

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Integrated Systems Laboratory, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland;Embedded Systems Laboratory, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland and Department of Computer Architecture and Automation, Complutense, University of Madrid, Madrid, Spai ...;Integrated Systems Laboratory, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego, CA

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Part I: Regular Papers
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We consider the problem of adjusting speeds of multiple computer processors, sharing the same thermal environment, such as a chip or multichip package. We assume that the speed of each processor (and associated variables such as power supply voltage) can be controlled, and we model the dissipated power of a processor as a positive and strictly increasing convex function of the speed. We show that the problem of processor speed control subject to thermal constraints for the environment is a convex optimization problem. We present an efficient infeasible-start primal-dual interior-point method for solving the problem. We also present a distributed method, using dual decomposition. Both of these approaches can be interpreted as nonlinear static control laws, which adjust the processor speeds based on the measured temperatures in the system. We give numerical examples to illustrate performance of the algorithms.