An evaluation of per-chip nonuniform frequency scaling on multicores

  • Authors:
  • Xiao Zhang;Kai Shen;Sandhya Dwarkadas;Rongrong Zhong

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester;Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester;Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester;Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester

  • Venue:
  • USENIXATC'10 Proceedings of the 2010 USENIX conference on USENIX annual technical conference
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Concurrently running applications on multiprocessors may desire different CPU frequency/voltage settings in order to achieve performance, power, or thermal objectives. Today's multicores typically require that all sibling cores on a single chip run at the same frequency/ voltage level while different CPU chips can have non-uniform settings. This paper targets multicorebased symmetric platforms and demonstrates the benefits of per-chip adaptive frequency scaling on multicores. Specifically, by grouping applications with similar frequency-to-performance effects, we create the opportunity for setting a chip-wide desirable frequency level. We run experiments with 12 SPECCPU2000 benchmarks and two server-style applications on a machine with two dual-core Intel "Woodcrest" processors. Results show that per-chip frequency scaling can save ∼20 watts of CPU power while maintaining performance within a specified bound of the original system.