Game-of-Life Temperature-Aware DVFS Strategy for Tile-Based Chip Many-Core Processors

We propose a novel technique which exploits the concept of Game-of-Life (GoL) originated from cellular automata to achieve a light-weight yet effective temperature-aware DVFS for tile-based Chip Many-Core Processors (CMPs). The proposed DVFS mechanism is based on the strategy that a CMP V/F region, consisting of several tiles sharing the same V/F level, first determines the local V/F level according to core and uncore performance interests of the resident tiles. Then, based on the temperatures of both local and neighbor V/F regions, the performance based V/F policy is revised towards thermal safety, minimizing the occurrence of chip thermal urgency threshold (TUT) violation. As such, our temperature-aware DVFS strategy implements an ecosystem where V/F regions try to secure as much performance as possible, but a sustainable thermal environment for itself and neighbor regions is also maintained, essentially mimicking the behavior of living cells that co-exist harmonically in a common environment. Full-system evaluations with PARSEC and SPEC OMP2012 multi-threaded benchmarks show that our GoL based temperature-aware DVFS technique can averagely reduce TUT violation by 43.4% (59.5% in maximum) compared to a thermal-oblivious DVFS mechanism and by 20.7% (31.9% in maximum) compared to a local-temperature aware DVFS mechanism, with graceful performance degradation.