Latency-Aware Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling on Many-Core Architectures for Data-Intensive Applications

Abstract

Low power is the first-class design requirement for HPC systems. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has become the commonly used and efficient technology to achieve a trade-off between power consumption and system performance. However, most the prior work using DVFS did not take into account the latency of voltage/frequency scaling, which is a critical factor in real hardware determining the power efficiency of the power management algorithm. This paper, firstly, investigate the latency features of DVFS on a real many-core hardware platform. Secondly, we propose a latency-aware DVFS algorithm for profile-based power management to avoid aggressive power state transitions. At last, we evaluate our algorithm on Intel SCC platform using a data-intensive benchmark, Graph 500 benchmark. The experimental results not only show impressive potential for energy saving in data-intensive applications (up to 31% energy saving and 60% EDP reduction), but also evaluate the efficiency of our latency-aware DVFS algorithm which achieves 12.0% extra energy saving and 5.0% extra EDP reduction, moreover, increases the execution performance by 22.4%.