Dark silicon aware power management for manycore systems under dynamic workloads

Dark Silicon denotes the phenomenon that, due to thermal and power constraints, the fraction of transistors that can operate at full frequency is decreasing with each technology generation. We propose a PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) controller based dynamic power management method that considers an upper bound on power consumption (called the Thermal Design Power (TDP)). To avoid violation of the TDP constraint for manycore systems running highly dynamic workloads, it provides fine-grained DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) including near-threshold operation. In addition, the method distinguishes applications with hard Real-Time, soft Real-Time and no Real-Time constraints and treats them with appropriate priorities. In simulations with dynamic workloads mixed-critical application profiles, we show that the method is effective in honoring the TDP bound and it can boost system throughput by over 43% compared to a naive TDP scheduling policy.