Temperature Aware Scheduling for Embedded Processors

Power density has been increasing at an alarming rate in recent processor generations resulting in high on-chip temperature. Higher temperature results in poor reliability and increased leakage current. In this paper, we propose a temperature aware scheduling technique in the context of embedded multi-tasking systems. We observe that there is a high variability in the thermal properties of different embedded applications. We design temperature-aware scheduling (TAS) scheme that exploits this variability to maintain the system temperature below a desired level while satisfying a number of requirements such as throughput, fairness and real time constraints. Moreover, TAS enables exploration of the tradeoffs between throughput and fairness in temperature-constrained systems. Compared against standard schedulers with reactive hardware-level thermal management, TAS provides better throughput with negligible impact on fairness.