Dynamic thermal management for multi-core microprocessors considering transient thermal effects

Dynamic thermal management method is a viable way to effectively mitigate the thermal emergences. In this paper, a new thermal management scheme is proposed to reduce the on-chip temperature variance and the occurrence of hot spots by considering more transient thermal effects. The new method performs the task migrations to reduce the temperature variations across the chip. Instead of intuitively assigning the heavy tasks to the low temperature cores to balance the thermal profile based on steady state thermal analysis, the proposed method applies moment matching based transient thermal analysis techniques for fast thermal estimation and prediction to guide the migration process. We show that by considering the dominant temperature moment component, the resulting algorithm can lead to significant reduction of hot spots without full transient thermal simulation. Our experimental results on a 16 core microprocessor demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the number of the hot spots by 50% compared to the simple lowest temperature based task scheduling method, leading to more uniform on-chip temperature distribution across the microprocessor cores.