Multicore systems-on-a-chip have permeated every segment of the digital market, from servers and supercomputers, to desktops and smart phone/mobile devices. Innovative applications continue to emerge that integrate user interactivity via mobile devices with the power of high-end computation and large-scale storage. These applications tend to demonstrate dynamic and diverse execution behaviors, requiring close tracking in order to manage resource consumption. Inherent application behavior variations and resource requirements, coupled with complex interactions due to contention for shared resources, present new challenges for efficient, dependable, and sustainable advances in computing and information technologies.
This project will develop foundational system mechanisms to manage individual cores, memory, and power/energy consumption on multicore-based systems, and explore resource allocation policies that use these mechanisms. A new online multicore power model will allow power and energy tracking at a fine-grain level, combining available hardware-based power measurements with event-based modeling and attribution of power for shared resources. Accuracy will be improved via coarse-grain measurement-triggered online model recalibration. A new operating system mechanism, power containers, will be developed to allow application-defined boundaries for resource tracking, breaking from the traditional thread and process boundary resource tracking in state-of-the-art operating systems. Further optimizations will be explored to lower the overhead of resource tracking, allowing online power accounting to scale to large core and resource counts. Finally, new techniques will be developed to enable use of the power containers to control and isolate power usage in an application-defined manner.
This project will enhance the power protection, energy efficiency, and dependability of multicore-based computer systems. The techniques developed can be broadly applied to emerging dynamic applications in data centers, desktops, and mobile devices. In particular, power containers will identify and mitigate (either malicious or unintentional) power anomalies (execution that results in unusually high power consumption), in both high-end servers and multi-core and multi-accelerator smart phones. The success of this project will contribute to the long-term sustainability of the world's fast evolving digital economy and society.
