Greening of Many-Core Processors in Network-Optimized Computing

This paper presents adaptive performance control for many-core processors in response to network traffic in order to reduce power dissipation. It presents two new techniques: smart core-number control, which averages out both performance and power dissipation by disabling inactive CPU cores, and smart core-performance control, which quickly adjusts both performance and power dissipation in each active CPU core by using a dynamic thermal controller. Evaluation results for a 1.8GHz 16-core/64-thread IBM PowerEN processor show that smart core-number control reduces power dissipation by 46% under low network traffic conditions and smart core-performance control reduces power dissipation by 21% even when large network traffic fluctuates by 80% for a short time.