A Fast Scheme to Investigate Thermal-Aware Scheduling Policy for Multicore Processors

Abstract

With more cores integrated into one single chip, the overall power consumption from the multiple concurrent running programs increases dramatically in a CMP processor which causes the thermal problem becomes more and more severer than the traditional superscalar processor. To leverage the thermal problem of a multicore processor, two kinds of orthogonal technique can be exploited. One is the commonly used Dynamic Thermal Management technique. The other is the thermal aware thread scheduling policy. For the latter one, some general ideas have been proposed by academic and industry researchers. The difficult to investigate the effectiveness of a thread scheduling policy is the huge search space coming from the different possible mapping combinations for a given multi-program workload. In this paper, we extend a simple thermal model originally used in a single core processor to a multicore environment and propose a fast scheme to search or compare the thermal effectiveness of different scheduling policies using the new model. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme can predict the thermal characteristics of the different scheduling policies with a reasonable accuracy and help researchers to fast investigate the performances of the policies without detailed time consuming simulations.