Power and Temperature

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Key architectural design challenges include power budgeting and temperature control. Saving power on a system is a very mature problem and my work has in this are has been to develop compiler driven techniques to address load imbalances in multiprocessor systems. By choosing whether to shutdown a processor, scale its performance of a task or to bundle multiple tasks on a single processor, using Integer Linear Programming techniques, significant savings in overall system power consumption is achieved.

The scaling of technology coupled with rising power dissipation has lead to an alarming rise in the on-chip temperature. It is key that the chip temperatures should be maintained below a set threshold to prevent damage to the chip. Cooling solutions that are hardware based add tremendously to the cost of computer systems, and other job control methods lead to severe performance loss. My work shows that it is possible to statically schedule tasks in Multi Processor Systems in an intelligent manner such  that the chip temperature does not rise over the threshold temperature and that the performance is not degraded severely. The graphs below show how as the threshold temperature is reduced due to architectural constraints, the peak on chip temperature is controlled accordingly.

Last updated: Apr 2008