Agent-based thermal management using real-time I/O communication relocation for 3D many-cores

Abstract

A major concern of current and future on-chip systems is the thermal problem i.e. electrical energy is dissipated leading to high chip temperatures. Short term effects may include transient malfunctioning whereas long-term effects may lead to deteriorating functionality (e.g. increased signal travel times) or to irreversible damage due to, for example, electro-migration. The problem worsens with the inception of 3D architectures as the per-surface dissipated electrical energy is larger, e.g. our evaluation shows an increase of 37.5% in peak temperature in an architecture with 2 layers compared to a single layer architecture. Our proposed concept addresses thermal problems in 3D-stacked many-core architectures resulting from high power densities. A hierarchical agent-based thermal management system initiates a proactive task migration onto cooler processing resources while a communication virtualization layer dynamically adapts and protects connectivity between (migrated) tasks and external I/Os. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.