Therma: Thermal-aware Run-time Thread Migration for Nanophotonic Interconnects

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce Therma, a thermal-aware run-time thread migration mechanism for managing temperature fluctuations in nanophotonic networks. Nanophotonics is one of the most promising communication substrate candidates for next-generation high-performance systems. However, their underlying components are sensitive to temperature fluctuations. These fluctuations arise mostly because of the temperature changes on the cores, which are adjacent to nanophotonic components. Therma minimizes thermal fluctuations on these temperature sensitive components by moving threads across cores. Evaluation results reveal that when each core is executing a single thread, Therma achieves a 15.4% and 6.1% reduction in the photonic power consumption compared to the baseline and an interconnectoblivious thread migration scheme, respectively. It also reduces photonic power consumption by up to 20.7% compared to the alternatives when running multiple threads per core on the system.