CSR: Small: Managing Multicore Energy for Emerging Applications and Devices

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Multicore systems-on-a-chip have permeated every segment of thedigital market, from servers and supercomputers, to desktops and smartphone/mobile devices. Innovative applications continue to emerge thatintegrate user interactivity via mobile devices with the power ofhigh-end computation and large-scale storage. These applications tendto demonstrate dynamic and diverse execution behaviors, requiringclose tracking in order to manage resource consumption. Inherentapplication behavior variations and resource requirements, coupledwith complex interactions due to contention for shared resources,present new challenges for efficient, dependable, and sustainableadvances in computing and information technologies.This project will develop foundational system mechanisms to manageindividual cores, memory, and power/energy consumption onmulticore-based systems, and explore resource allocation policies thatuse these mechanisms. A new online multicore power model will allowpower and energy tracking at a fine-grain level, combining availablehardware-based power measurements with event-based modeling andattribution of power for shared resources. Accuracy will be improvedvia coarse-grain measurement-triggered online model recalibration. Anew operating system mechanism, power containers, will be developed toallow application-defined boundaries for resource tracking, breakingfrom the traditional thread and process boundary resource tracking instate-of-the-art operating systems. Further optimizations will beexplored to lower the overhead of resource tracking, allowing onlinepower accounting to scale to large core and resource counts. Finally,new techniques will be developed to enable use of the power containersto control and isolate power usage in an application-defined manner.This project will enhance the power protection, energy efficiency, anddependability of multicore-based computer systems. The techniquesdeveloped can be broadly applied to emerging dynamic applications indata centers, desktops, and mobile devices. In particular, powercontainers will identify and mitigate (either malicious orunintentional) power anomalies (execution that results in unusuallyhigh power consumption), in both high-end servers and multi-core andmulti-accelerator smart phones. The success of this project willcontribute to the long-term sustainability of the world's fastevolving digital economy and society.