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

Predictive Power Management for Multi-Core Processors
William Lloyd Bircher, PhD.
The University of Texas at Austin, 2010
Supervisor: Lizy John
Energy consumption by computing systems is rapidly increasing due to the growth of
data centers and pervasive computing. In 2006 data center energy usage in the United
States reached 61 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh) at an annual cost of 4.5 billion USD
[Pl08]. It is projected to reach 100 billion KWh by 2011 at a cost of 7.4 billion USD.
The nature of energy usage in these systems provides an opportunity to reduce
consumption.
Specifically, the power and performance demand of computing systems vary widely in
time and across workloads. This has led to the design of dynamically adaptive or power
managed systems. At runtime, these systems can be reconfigured to provide optimal
performance and power capacity to match workload demand. This causes the system to
frequently be over or under provisioned. Similarly, the power demand of the system is
difficult to account for. The aggregate power consumption of a system is composed of
many heterogeneous systems, each with a unique power consumption characteristic.
This research addresses the problem of when to apply dynamic power management in
multi-core processors by accounting for and predicting power and performance demand
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