AdBoost: Thermal Aware Performance Boosting Through Dark Silicon Patterning

Increasing power densities of many-core systems leaves a fraction of on-chip resources inactive, referred to as dark silicon. Efficient management of critical interlinked parameters-power, performance and temperature can improve resource utilization and mitigate dark silicon. In this paper, we present a run-time resource management system for thermal aware performance boosting using a dark silicon aware run-time application mapping strategy. The mapping policy patterns inactive cores among active cores for relatively lower and even distribution of operating temperatures. This provides enough thermal headroom for boosting the frequency of active cores upon performance surges and allows sustained boosting periods, improving the performance further. We design a controller for thermal aware performance boosting that decides on efficient allocation utilization of power budget and thermal headroom obtained from patterning. Our strategy yields up to 37 percent better throughput, 29 percent lower waiting time and up to 2 × longer boosting periods, in comparison with other state-of-the-art run-time mapping policies.