Thermal-aware on-line task allocation for 3D multi-core processor throughput optimization

Three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC) has become an emerging technology in view of its advantages in packing density and flexibility in heterogeneous integration. The multi-core processor (MCP), which is able to deliver equivalent performance with less power consumption, is a candidate for 3D implementation. However, when maximizing the throughput of 3D MCP, due to the inherent heat removal limitation, thermal issues must be taken into consideration. Furthermore, since the temperature of a core strongly depends on its location in the 3D MCP, a proper task allocation helps to alleviate any potential thermal problem and improve the throughput. In this paper, we present a thermal-aware on-line task allocation algorithm for 3D MCPs. The results of our experiments show that our proposed method achieves 16.32X runtime speedup, and 23.18% throughput improvement. These are comparable to the exhaustive solutions obtained from optimization modeling software LINGO. On average, our throughput is only 0.85% worse than that of the exhaustive method. In 128 task-to-core allocations, our method takes only 0.932 ms, which is 57.74 times faster than the previous work.