Syed Ali Asadullah Bukhari and Faiq Khalid Lodhi
Abstract
Dynamic thermal management (DTM) techniques based on task migration provide a promising solution to mitigate thermal emergencies and thereby ensuring safe operation and reliability of Many-Core systems. These techniques can be classified as central or distributed on the basis of a central DTM controller for the whole system or individual DTM controllers for each core or set of cores in the system, respectively. However, having a trustworthy comparison between central (c-) and distributed (d-) DTM techniques to find out the most suitable one for a given system is quite challenging. This is primarily due to the systemic difference between cDTM and dDTM controllers, and the inherent non-exhaustiveness of simulation and emulation methods conventionally used for DTM analysis. In this paper, we present a novel methodology called CAnDy-TM (stands for Comparative Analysis of Dynamic Thermal Management) that employs Model Checking to perform formal comparative analysis for cDTM and dDTM techniques. We identify a set of generic functional and performance properties to provide a common ground for their comparison. We demonstrate the usability and benefits of our methodology by comparing state-of-the-art cDTM and dDTM techniques, and illustrate which technique is good w.r.t. thermal stability and other task migration parameters. Such an analysis helps in selecting the most appropriate DTM for a given chip.
Methodology
Comparative Analysis of DTM Techniques using nuXmv
nuXmv Model
Publications
S. A. A. Bukhari, F. K. Lodhi, O. Hasan, M. Shafique and J. Henkel, “CAnDy-TM: Comparative Analysis of Dynamic Thermal Management in Many-Cores using Model Checking”, Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE-2017), Swisstech, Laussane, Switzerland, To Appear.
Contact Information
Syed Ali Asadullah Bukhari and Faiq Khalid are Post Graduate students of Electrical Engineering at NUST School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. They are working on this project in the System Analysis & Verification (SAVE) Lab of NUST-SEECS, under the supervision of Dr. Osman Hasan.