Reliability-aware thermal management for hard real-time applications on multi-core processors

Advances in chip-multiprocessor processing capabilities have led to an increased power consumption and temperature hotspots. Reducing the on-die peak temperature is important from the power reduction and reliability considerations. However, the presence of task deadlines constrain the reduction of peak temperature and thus complicates the determination of optimal speeds for minimizing the peak temperature. We formulate the determination of optimal speeds for minimizing the peak temperature of execution with task deadlines as a quasiconvex optimization problem. This formulation includes accurate power and thermal models with the leakage power dependency on temperature. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is very flexible in adapting to various scenarios of workload and deadline specifications. We obtained an 8°C reduction in peak temperature for a sample execution of benchmarks.