Rapid Power Management in Latency-Critical Systems using Reconfigurable Cores

Abstract

Under submission

Key Points

  • Tackled low utilization and poor energy proportionality in servers using reconfigurable cores which tune performance/power by turning on/off lanes in a superscalar out-of-order core.
  • Enabled co-scheduling of latency-sensitive & batch apps and handled interference by dynamically reconfiguring cores.
  • Reconfigurable cores, as against DVFS, offer a solution towards energy proportionality as they reduce static power.
  • Formulated it as an optimization problem that involves appropriately reconfiguring cores, to maximize throughput for batch apps, and meet the QoS of latency-sensitive apps while operating under server node’s power budget.
  • Developed online resource manager to rapidly characterize the system and to find near-optimal solution using a combination of collaborative filtering and heuristic search techniques.
  • Preserved QoS of all latency-sensitive apps and also, achieved up to 3.5x performance improvement on batch apps compared to core-level gating under stringent power budget across different latency-sensitive and batch apps.