Exploiting Thermal Coupling Information in MPSoC Dynamic Thermal Management

Temperature profile optimization is one of the most relevant and challenging problems in modern multi-core architectures. Several Dynamic Thermal Management approaches have been proposed in literature, and run-time policies have been designed to direct the allocation of tasks according to temperature constraints. Thermal coupling is recognized to have a role of paramount importance in determining the thermal envelope of the processor, nevertheless several works in literature do not take directly into account this aspect while determining the status of the system at run-time. Without this information, the DTM design is not able to fully redistribute the roles that each core have on the system-level temperature, thus neglecting important information for temperature-constrained workload allocation. Purpose of this work is to provide a novel mechanism to better support DTM policies, focusing on the estimation of the impact of thermal coupling in determining the appropriate status from a thermal stand-point. The presented approach is based on two stages: off-line characterization of the target architecture estimates thermal coupling coefficients, that will be used at run-time for proper DTM decisions.