cfaed Seminar Series

Sandip Kundu , University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Exploring Heterogeneity within a Core for Improved Power Efficiency

22.12.2016 (Thursday) , 10:00
Meeting-Room 204 , Georg-Schumann-Str. 7a , 01187 Dresden

Asymmetric multi-core processors (AMPs) comprise of cores with different sizes of
micro-architectural resources yielding very different performance and energy
characteristics. Since the computational demands of workloads vary from one task to
the other, AMPs often provide greater power efficiency than symmetric multicores.
Furthermore, as the computational demands of a task change during its course of
execution, reassigning the task from one core to another, where it can run more
efficiently can further improve the overall energy efficiency. However, too frequent
re-assignments of tasks to cores may result in high overhead. To greatly reduce this
overhead we propose a morphable core architecture that dynamically adapts its
resource sizes and operating frequency to assume one of four possible core
configurations. Such a morphable architecture allows more frequent task to core
configuration re-assignments for a better match between the current needs of the
task and the available resources. To make the online morphing decisions we have
developed a runtime analysis scheme using hardware performance counters. Our
results indicate that the proposed morphable architecture controlled by the runtime
management scheme can improve the performance/watt of applications by 43%
over executing on a static AMP.

Sandip Kundu is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Prior to joining academia, he spent several years in industry: first as a Research Staff Member at IBM Research Division and then at Intel Corporation as a Principal Engineer. He has published well-over 200 research papers in VLSI design and test and holds several key patents including ultra-drowsy sleep mode in processors, and has given more than a dozen tutorials at various conferences. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS), Senior International Scientist of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society. He is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. Previously, he has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems and ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems. He has been Technical Program Chair/General Chair of multiple conferences including ICCD, ATS, ISVLSI, DFTS and VLSI Design Conference.

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