Throughput optimal task allocation under thermal constraints for multi-core processors

Abstract

It is known that temperature gradients and thermal hotspots affect the reliability of microprocessors. Temperature is also an important constraint when maximizing the performance of processors. Although DVFS and DFS can be used to extract higher performance from temperature and power constrained single core processors, the full potential of multi-core performance cannot be exploited without the use of thread migration or task-to-core allocation schemes. In this paper, we formulate the problem of throughput-optimal task allocation on thermally constrained multi-core processors, and present a novel solution that includes optimal speed throttling. We show that the algorithms are implementable in real time and can be implemented in operating system's dynamic scheduling policy. The method presented here can result in a significant improvement in throughput over existing methods (5X over a naive scheme).