The CRISP performance model for dynamic voltage and frequency scaling in a GPGPU

Abstract

This paper presents CRISP, the first runtime analytical model of performance in the face of changing frequency in a GPGPU. It shows that prior models not targeted at a GPGPU fail to account for important characteristics of GPGPU execution, including the high degree of overlap between memory access and computation and the frequency of store-related stalls. CRISP provides significantly greater accuracy than prior runtime performance models, being within 4% on average when scaling frequency by up to 7X. Using CRISP to drive a runtime energy efficiency controller yields a 10.7% improvement in energy-delay product, vs 6.2% attainable via the best prior performance model.