The Thermal-Constrained Real-Time Systems Design on Multi-Core Platforms -- An Analytical Approach

Authors

SHI SHA, Florida International UniversityFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Major/Program

Computer Engineering

First Advisor's Name

Gang Quan

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee chair

Second Advisor's Name

Arif Selcuk Uluagac

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Committee member

Third Advisor's Name

Nezih Pala

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee member

Fourth Advisor's Name

Wujie Wen

Fourth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee member

Fifth Advisor's Name

Raju Rangaswami

Fifth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee member

Keywords

thermal, power, multi-core, real-time, temperature, throughput, CPU, GPU, embedded systems, low-power design, energy, operating systems, computer architecture

Date of Defense

3-21-2018

Abstract

Over the past decades, the shrinking transistor size enabled more transistors to be integrated into an IC chip, to achieve higher and higher computing performances. However, the semiconductor industry is now reaching a saturation point of Moore’s Law largely due to soaring power consumption and heat dissipation, among other factors. High chip temperature not only significantly increases packing/cooling cost, degrades system performance and reliability, but also increases the energy consumption and even damages the chip permanently. Although designing 2D and even 3D multi-core processors helps to lower the power/thermal barrier for single-core architectures by exploring the thread/process level parallelism, the higher power density and longer heat removal path has made the thermal problem substantially more challenging, surpassing the heat dissipation capability of traditional cooling mechanisms such as cooling fan, heat sink, heat spread, etc., in the design of new generations of computing systems. As a result, dynamic thermal management (DTM), i.e. to control the thermal behavior by dynamically varying computing performance and workload allocation on an IC chip, has been well-recognized as an effective strategy to deal with the thermal challenges.

Over the past decades, the shrinking transistor size, benefited from the advancement of IC technology, enabled more transistors to be integrated into an IC chip, to achieve higher and higher computing performances. However, the semiconductor industry is now reaching a saturation point of Moore’s Law largely due to soaring power consumption and heat dissipation, among other factors. High chip temperature not only significantly increases packing/cooling cost, degrades system performance and reliability, but also increases the energy consumption and even damages the chip permanently. Although designing 2D and even 3D multi-core processors helps to lower the power/thermal barrier for single-core architectures by exploring the thread/process level parallelism, the higher power density and longer heat removal path has made the thermal problem substantially more challenging, surpassing the heat dissipation capability of traditional cooling mechanisms such as cooling fan, heat sink, heat spread, etc., in the design of new generations of computing systems. As a result, dynamic thermal management (DTM), i.e. to control the thermal behavior by dynamically varying computing performance and workload allocation on an IC chip, has been well-recognized as an effective strategy to deal with the thermal challenges.

Different from many existing DTM heuristics that are based on simple intuitions, we seek to address the thermal problems through a rigorous analytical approach, to achieve the high predictability requirement in real-time system design. In this regard, we have made a number of important contributions. First, we develop a series of lemmas and theorems that are general enough to uncover the fundamental principles and characteristics with regard to the thermal model, peak temperature identification and peak temperature reduction, which are key to thermal-constrained real-time computer system design. Second, we develop a design-time frequency and voltage oscillating approach on multi-core platforms, which can greatly enhance the system throughput and its service capacity. Third, different from the traditional workload balancing approach, we develop a thermal-balancing approach that can substantially improve the energy efficiency and task partitioning feasibility, especially when the system utilization is high or with a tight temperature constraint. The significance of our research is that, not only can our proposed algorithms on throughput maximization and energy conservation outperform existing work significantly as demonstrated in our extensive experimental results, the theoretical results in our research are very general and can greatly benefit other thermal-related research.

Identifier

FIDC004089

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5182-9666

Recommended Citation

SHA, SHI, "The Thermal-Constrained Real-Time Systems Design on Multi-Core Platforms -- An Analytical Approach" (2018). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3713.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3713