Having your cake and eating it too: Energy savings without performance loss through resource sharing driven power management

Abstract

Typically in computer systems, performance must be traded-off to achieve energy savings or, conversely, performance gains come with significant energy overhead. Here, we present a novel approach that can achieve synergistic energy-savings and performance gain in chip multiprocessors (CMPs). Our key observation is that per-core dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS) can be used as a client regulation mechanism for shared resources on-die. Based on this observation, we propose a new DVFS technique inspired by TCP Vegas, a congestion control protocol from the IP-networking domain. Full system simulations on PARSEC benchmarks show that our technique reduces total CMP energy dissipation by over 40% with a small performance improvement.