On the Feasibility of Dynamic Power Steering

While high performance has always been the primary constraint behind large-scale system design, future systems will be built with increasing energy efficiency in mind. Mechanisms such as fine-grained power scaling and gating will provide tools to system-software and application developers to ensure the most efficient use of tightly constrained power budgets. Such approaches to-date have been focused on node-level optimizations to impact overall system energy efficiency. In this work we introduce Dynamic Power Steering, in which power can be dynamically routed across a system to resources where it will be of most benefit and away from other resources to maintain a near-constant overall power budget. This, a higher-level algorithmic approach to improving energy efficiency, considers the whole extent of a system being used by an application. It can be used for applications in which there is load-imbalance that varies over its execution. Using two classes of applications, namely those that contain a wavefront type processing, and a particle-in-cell, we quantify the benefit of Dynamic Power Steering for a variety of workload characteristics and derive some insight into the ways in which workload behavior affect Power Steering applicability.