Coordinated management of DVFS and cache partitioning under QoS constraints to save energy in multi-core systems
Journal article, 2020

Reducing the energy expended to carry out a computational task is important. In this work, we explore the prospects of meeting Quality-of-Service requirements of tasks on a multi-core system while adjusting resources to expend a minimum of energy. This paper considers, for the first time, a QoS-driven coordinated resource management algorithm (RMA) that dynamically adjusts the size of the per-core last-level cache partitions and the per-core voltage–frequency settings to save energy while respecting QoS requirements of every application in multi-programmed workloads run on multi-core systems. It does so by doing configuration-space exploration across the spectrum of LLC partition sizes and Dynamic Voltage–Frequency Scaling (DVFS) settings at runtime at negligible overhead. We show that the energy of 4-core and 8-core systems can be reduced by up to 18% and 14%, respectively, compared to a baseline with even distribution of cache resources and a fixed mid-range core voltage–frequency setting. The energy savings can potentially reach 29% if the QoS targets are relaxed to 40% longer execution time.

Multi-core resource management

Cache partitioning

Quality of service (QoS)

Energy efficiency

Dynamic voltage–frequency scaling (DVFS)

Author

Mehrzad Nejat

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Madhavan Manivannan

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Miquel Pericas

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Per Stenström

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing

0743-7315 (ISSN) 1096-0848 (eISSN)

Vol. 144 246-259

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

Embedded Systems

Computer Systems

DOI

10.1016/j.jpdc.2020.05.006

More information

Latest update

6/26/2020