Contention aware frequency scaling on CMPs with guaranteed quality of service

Workload consolidation is usually performed in datacenters to improve server utilization for higher energy efficiency. One of the key issues related to workload consolidation is contention for shared resources such as last level cache, main memory, memory controller, etc. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) of CPU is another effective technique that has widely been used to trade the performance for power reduction. We have found that the degree of resource contention of a system affects its performance sensitivity to CPU frequency. In this paper, we apply machine learning techniques to construct a model that quantifies runtime performance degradation caused by resource contention and frequency scaling. The inputs of our model are readings from Performance Monitoring Units (PMU) screened using standard feature selection technique. The model is tested on an SMT-enabled chip multi-processor and it reaches up to 90% accuracy. Experimental results show that, guided by the performance model, runtime power management techniques such as DVFS can achieve more accurate power and performance tradeoff without violating the quality of service (QoS) agreement. The QoS violation of the proposed system is significantly lower than systems that have no performance degradation information.