Application-Controlled Frequency Scaling Explained
The TURBO Diaries: Application-controlled Frequency Scaling Explained Jons-Tobias Wamhoff, Stephan Diestelhorst, and Christof Fetzer, Technische Universät Dresden; Patrick Marlier and Pascal Felber, Université de Neuchâtel; Dave Dice, Oracle Labs https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc14/technical-sessions/presentation/wamhoff This paper is included in the Proceedings of USENIX ATC ’14: 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. June 19–20, 2014 • Philadelphia, PA 978-1-931971-10-2 Open access to the Proceedings of USENIX ATC ’14: 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference is sponsored by USENIX. The TURBO Diaries: Application-controlled Frequency Scaling Explained Jons-Tobias Wamhoff Patrick Marlier Dave Dice Stephan Diestelhorst Pascal Felber Christof Fetzer Technische Universtat¨ Dresden, Germany Universite´ de Neuchatel,ˆ Switzerland Oracle Labs, USA Abstract these features from an application as needed. Examples in- Most multi-core architectures nowadays support dynamic volt- clude: accelerating the execution of key sections of code on age and frequency scaling (DVFS) to adapt their speed to the the critical path of multi-threaded applications [9]; boosting system’s load and save energy. Some recent architectures addi- time-critical operations or high-priority threads; or reducing tionally allow cores to operate at boosted speeds exceeding the the energy consumption of applications executing low-priority nominal base frequency but within their thermal design power. threads. Furthermore, workloads specifically designed to run In this paper, we propose a general-purpose library that on processors with heterogeneous cores (e.g., few fast and allows selective control of DVFS from user space to accelerate many slow cores) may take additional advantage of application- multi-threaded applications and expose the potential of hetero- level frequency scaling.
[Show full text]