Power modeling and thermal management techniques for manycores

The rising number of cores in manycore architectures, along with technology scaling, results in high power densities and thermal issues on the die. To explore innovative thermal management techniques in such processors, we need an accurate online estimate of the power consumption. In this paper, we present the first ever power model for Intel many integrated core processors, which we use to show the benefit of a novel manycore specific thermal management technique called workload intermixing. Our proposed model leverages performance monitoring events and accounts for operating voltage and clock frequency. We validate our model for Intel Knights Ferry (KNF) design and show that we have an average of 4.73% prediction error vs. measurements. We provide the breakdown of total power into three main components: compute, memory, and interconnect and use it as an input for thermal management. Our simulation results show that our proposed intermixing of workloads in KNF architecture can reduce the total number of thermal emergency situations by 58% with energy savings of 14% on average.