Run-time adaptable on-chip thermal triggers

With ever-increasing power densities, Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) techniques have become mainstream in today´s systems. An important component of such techniques is the thermal trigger. It has been shown that predictive thermal triggers can outperform reactive ones. In this paper, we present a novel trade-off space of predictive thermal triggers, and compare different approaches proposed in the literature. We argue that run-time adaptability is a crucial parameter of interest. We present a run-time adaptable thermal simulator compatible with arbitrary sensor configuration based on the Neural Network (NN) simulator presented in. We present experimental results on Niagara UltraSPARC T1 chip with real-life benchmark applications. Our results quantitatively establish the effectiveness of the proposed simulator for reducing (by up to 90%), the otherwise unacceptably high errors, that can arise due to expected leakage current variation and design-time thermal modeling errors.