University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2013 Computational Sprinting: Exceeding Sustainable Power in Thermally Constrained Systems Arun Raghavan University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Computer Engineering Commons, and the Computer Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Raghavan, Arun, "Computational Sprinting: Exceeding Sustainable Power in Thermally Constrained Systems" (2013). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 915. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/915 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/915 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Computational Sprinting: Exceeding Sustainable Power in Thermally Constrained Systems Abstract Although process technology trends predict that transistor sizes will continue to shrink for a few more generations, voltage scaling has stalled and thus future chips are projected to be increasingly more power hungry than previous generations. Particularly in mobile devices which are severely cooling constrained, it is estimated that the peak operation of a future chip could generate heat ten times faster than than the device can sustainably vent. However, many mobile applications do not demand sustained performance; rather they comprise short bursts of computation in response to sporadic user activity. To improve responsiveness for such applications, this dissertation proposes computational sprinting, in which a system greatly exceeds sustainable power margins (by up to 10Ã?) to provide up to a few seconds of high-performance computation when a user interacts with the device. Computational sprinting exploits the material property of thermal capacitance to temporarily store the excess heat generated when sprinting. After sprinting, the chip returns to sustainable power levels and dissipates the stored heat when the system is idle. This dissertation: (i) broadly analyzes thermal, electrical, hardware, and software considerations to analyze the feasibility of engineering a system which can provide the responsiveness of a plat- form with 10Ã? higher sustainable power within today's cooling constraints, (ii) leverages existing sources of thermal capacitance to demonstrate sprinting on a real system today, and (iii) identifies the energy- performance characteristics of sprinting operation to determine runtime sprint pacing policies. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Computer and Information Science First Advisor Milo M. Martin Keywords Energy efficient computer architecture, Parallel mobile architecture, Themal-aware computer architecture Subject Categories Computer Engineering | Computer Sciences This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/915 COMPUTATIONAL SPRINTING: EXCEEDING SUSTAINABLE POWER IN THERMALLY CONSTRAINED SYSTEMS Arun Raghavan A DISSERTATION in Computer and Information Science Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Milo M. K. Martin, Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science Supervisor of Dissertation Val Tannen, Professor of Computer and Information Science Graduate Group Chairperson Dissertation Committee Andre´ DeHon, Professor of Electrical and System Engineering Zachary Ives, Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science Jonathan M. Smith, Professor of Computer and Information Science David Brooks, Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University COMPUTATIONAL SPRINTING: EXCEEDING SUSTAINABLE POWER IN THERMALLY CONSTRAINED SYSTEMS COPYRIGHT 2013 Arun Raghavan To my parents. iii Acknowledgments Milo Martin has been my advisor through my years in graduate school. Beyond his profound contributions to all our published research, he has influenced how I think, read, write and present my work. I hope I continue to benefit from his advise in the years ahead. Soon after Milo and I had the first conversation about sprinting and ran through some back- of-the-envelop calculations, Tom Wenisch (Michigan) shared our impressions of initial disbelief and cautious optimism. He immediately brought on board Kevin Pipe and Marios Papaefthymiou (both from the University of Michigan) whose added expertise in thermal and electrical engineering respectively gave this project the required critical mass. Milo, Tom, Kevin and Marios were hence instrumental in the inception of this project and continue the active collaboration as of this writing. Yixin Luo and Anuj Chandawalla performed the SPICE experiments for the many-core activa- tion sequence under Marios’ supervision at Michigan. Lei Shao put together and experimented with several phase-change heatsinks (including those used in this dissertation) and is continuing to work on thermal aspects of sprinting under Kevin’s supervision at Michigan. Laurel Emurian at Penn helped put together adrenaline-2 and adrenaline-3 (the successor sprinting testbeds to adrenaline-1) and reported the first successes with sprint-and-rest for sustained workloads. Kris and SSVR read through drafts of this dissertation, catching several bugs and improving the English. Drew Hilton created the multicore x86 simulator used in Chapter 4. Amir Roth and E. Lewis (and Milo, of course) helped make the Architecture and Compilers Group (ACG) at Penn my venue for grad school. Amir taught me CIS 501 during the first year (my first ever college level computer architecture course), hired me as teaching assistant during the next, and left me with an indelible classroom experience. Anne, Colin, Drew, Tingting and Vlad welcomed me as a fellow student into ACG. Colin helped make my initial experiences with research successful, co-authored my first couple of publications and taught me much along the way. Most of iv my years in Levine 614 were spent alongside Drew and Santosh, and later Abhishek, Christian and Laurel (and sometimes Sela). They shared the SGE cluster with me before deadlines, helped debug code, and offered feedback on papers. Adam and Emily joined the ACG folks in sitting through several practice talks, patiently guiding each iteration towards a better version. Rajeev, Sudipto and Benjamin Pierce taught excellent courses which gave me an appreciation for theory, even if I quickly learned that it wasn’t my cup of tea. Instead, I was happy to collaborate with Abhishek, Jyotirmoy, Sela, Milo and Rajeev on a PLDI paper which included a lot of Greek. I turned to Mike Felker for any departmental requirement and he responded with incredible efficiency every single time. Mark, Amy, Gail, Towanda and Lillian at the Moore Business Of- fice facilitated equipment orders, reimbursed travels and even replaced my stolen laptop. Brittany, Charity, Cheryl, Maggie and Marissa helped with booking conference rooms, projector rentals and receiving shipments. Chip, Dan and the good folks at CETS managed the cluster, desktops and even helped with technical queries when setting up the adrenaline machines. Doug Carmean, Mike Upton and Mark Davis hosted me as an intern with the Larrabee archi- tecture team in Intel Hillsboro. Besides the opportunity to work on architectural exploration of a slated product, I enjoyed the conversations with several brilliant industry veterans. Finally I would like to thank my dissertation committee—David Brooks, Andre’ DeHon, Zack Ives and Jonathan Smith, who offered valuable direction after my proposal towards guiding the goals of this dissertation, and improved this document with their feedback. It has been a privilege to have them on my committee. v ABSTRACT COMPUTATIONAL SPRINTING: EXCEEDING SUSTAINABLE POWER IN THERMALLY CONSTRAINED SYSTEMS Arun Raghavan Milo M. K. Martin Although process technology trends predict that transistor sizes will continue to shrink for a few more generations, voltage scaling has stalled and thus future chips are projected to be increasingly more power hungry than previous generations. Particularly in mobile devices which are severely cooling constrained, it is estimated that the peak operation of a future chip could generate heat ten times faster than than the device can sustainably vent. However, many mobile applications do not demand sustained performance; rather they comprise short bursts of computation in response to sporadic user activity. To improve responsiveness for such applications, this dissertation proposes computational sprinting, in which a system greatly exceeds sustainable power margins (by up to 10×) to provide up to a few seconds of high-performance computation when a user interacts with the device. Computational sprinting exploits the material property of thermal capacitance to temporarily store the excess heat generated when sprinting. After sprinting, the chip returns to sustainable power levels and dissipates the stored heat when the system is idle. This dissertation: (i) broadly analyzes thermal, electrical, hardware, and software considerations to analyze the feasibility of engineering a system which can provide the responsiveness of a plat- form with 10× higher sustainable power within today’s cooling constraints, (ii) leverages existing sources of thermal capacitance to demonstrate sprinting on a real system today, and (iii) identifies the energy-performance characteristics of sprinting operation to determine runtime sprint pacing policies. vi Contents 1 Introduction