Access-Aware Memory Thermal Management

Recently, thermal management of memory subsystem has become an issue for server platforms. An effective solution is to gate processor cores and thus stop sending memory requests when memory thermal emergency happens. Existing schemes usually treat all the programs running on a system equally upon memory thermal emergency. However, since the memory temperature is closely related to the memory throughput and each program generates different amount of memory traffic, the memory heat produced by each program can be very different. As a result, the existing schemes may cause severe performance loss with a low efficiency on memory temperature reduction. To address this issue, we propose a new memory thermal management scheme that halts memory-intensive applications longer than non-memory-intensive ones upon memory thermal emergency. Thus, the memory can be cooled down more quickly, which in turn brings down the performance loss. We implement and evaluate our scheme on a real system. Compared to an existing memory thermal management scheme that halts the running programs equally in a round-robin way, our scheme can improve performance by 14.3% on average (up to 21.4%).