Fine-grained per-core frequency scheduling for power efficient-multicore execution

There is growing interest in the energy consumed by computer systems, for both individual (battery life) and environmental (global warming) reasons. Multicore architectures offer a potential opportunity for energy conservation by allowing cores to operate at lower frequencies. Previous work on analyzing power consumption of multicores assumes that all cores must run at the same frequency. However, new technologies, such as fast voltage scaling and Turbo Boost, allow cores to operate at different frequencies. In this paper, we present an energy-aware resource management model, ROT-MCP, which provides a flexible way to analyze energy consumption of multicores operating at non-uniform frequencies. This information can then be used to generate a energy-efficient schedule for execution of the computations - as well as a schedule of frequency changes on a per-core basis - while satisfying performance requirements of computations. Experimental results show that the energy savings achieved using this approach far outweigh the energy consumed in the reasoning required for generating the schedules.