Copyright by William Lloyd Bircher 2010 - The Laboratory for ...

4. Design a predictive power management scheme to improve performance and
power efficiency.
1.5 Thesis Statement
Complete system power consumption of a multi-core system can be accurately estimated
by tracking core-level CPU performance events. These estimates may be used to predict
changes in power and performance of the system. Compared to commercial, reactive
power managers this predictive power manager yields higher performance and lower
power.
1.6 Contributions
This dissertation makes several contributions in the areas of modeling methodology,
power models, measurement-based workload characterization and novel power
management strategies.
a) A methodology for constructing power models based on performance events. The
methodology is shown to be effective across CPU architectures, system categories
and workloads.
b) A simple, accurate model for CPU power based on performance counters. The
model is constructed by applying linear-regression to power and performance
measurements captured on an actual system. The model demonstrates the need to
account for speculative execution when modeling power consumption.
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