On-line thermal emulation: How to speed-up your thermal controller design

Abstract

Dynamic thermal management (DTM) is a key technology for future many-core systems. Indeed systems, as both server-class and embedded chip multiprocessors are thermally constrained. DTM design requires consideration for the chain of interactions between HW operating points, workload phases, power consumption, die temperature, HW monitor infrastructure, control policy. Hugely different time scales are involved, from microseconds to hours. Simulating performance of DTM solutions for a many-core system in a reasonable time is an open problem. In this paper we present an on-line thermal emulation framework based on the Intel Single-Chip-Cloud computer. In our framework a subset of the cores are used to on-line emulate the evolution of a generic thermal floorplan based on the real workload usage and operating point selected by the rest of the cores which emulate the target managed system. This enables design space exploration of dynamic thermal management solutions at the speed of real workload execution.