A Criticality-Aware DVFS Runtime Utility for Optimizing Power Efficiency of Multithreaded Applications

The performance bottleneck in multithreaded programs usually depends on critical threads. We propose a runtime utility, which can find critical threads using state-of-the-art methods and optimize the power and performance by scaling frequency. In result, this runtime utility can help processors to achieve higher power-efficiency, which can earn about 14% energy and reduce 11.7% EDP comparing to ondemand offered by Linux kernel, in average. In the meanwhile, it consumes 15% and 25% less power than ondemand and performance, respectively. Since our utility only depends on DVFS and several performance monitor units (PMU) in CPU, which most modern processors provide, it can be easily ported to various systems.