Practical Dynamic Thermal Management on Intel Desktop Computer

Authors

Guanglei Liu, Florida International UniversityFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Major/Program

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor's Name

Gang Quan

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Nezih Pala

Third Advisor's Name

Deng Pan

Fourth Advisor's Name

Jean H. Andrian

Fifth Advisor's Name

Kang K. Yen

Keywords

Dynamic thermal management, thermal-aware scheduling, throughput maximization, practical hardware platform, temperature

Date of Defense

7-12-2012

Abstract

Fueled by increasing human appetite for high computing performance, semiconductor technology has now marched into the deep sub-micron era. As transistor size keeps shrinking, more and more transistors are integrated into a single chip. This has increased tremendously the power consumption and heat generation of IC chips. The rapidly growing heat dissipation greatly increases the packaging/cooling costs, and adversely affects the performance and reliability of a computing system. In addition, it also reduces the processor's life span and may even crash the entire computing system. Therefore, dynamic thermal management (DTM) is becoming a critical problem in modern computer system design.

Extensive theoretical research has been conducted to study the DTM problem. However, most of them are based on theoretically idealized assumptions or simplified models. While these models and assumptions help to greatly simplify a complex problem and make it theoretically manageable, practical computer systems and applications must deal with many practical factors and details beyond these models or assumptions.

The goal of our research was to develop a test platform that can be used to validate theoretical results on DTM under well-controlled conditions, to identify the limitations of existing theoretical results, and also to develop new and practical DTM techniques. This dissertation details the background and our research efforts in this endeavor. Specifically, in our research, we first developed a customized test platform based on an Intel desktop. We then tested a number of related theoretical works and examined their limitations under the practical hardware environment. With these limitations in mind, we developed a new reactive thermal management algorithm for single-core computing systems to optimize the throughput under a peak temperature constraint. We further extended our research to a multicore platform and developed an effective proactive DTM technique for throughput maximization on multicore processor based on task migration and dynamic voltage frequency scaling technique. The significance of our research lies in the fact that our research complements the current extensive theoretical research in dealing with increasingly critical thermal problems and enabling the continuous evolution of high performance computing systems.

Identifier

FI12080613

Recommended Citation

Liu, Guanglei, "Practical Dynamic Thermal Management on Intel Desktop Computer" (2012). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 688.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/688