Addressing thermal nonuniformity in SMT workloads

Abstract

We explore DTM techniques within the context of uniform and nonuniform SMT workloads. While DVS is suitable for addressing workloads with uniformly high temperatures, for nonuniform workloads, performance loss occurs because of the slowdown of the cooler thread. To address this, we propose and evaluate DTM mechanisms that exploit the steering-based thread management mechanisms inherent in a clustered SMT architecture. We show that in contrast to DVS, which operates globally, our techniques are more effective at controlling temperature for nonuniform workloads. Furthermore, we devise a DTM technique that combines steering and DVS to achieve consistently good performance across all workloads. © 2008 ACM.