Future aware Dynamic Thermal Management in CPU-GPU Embedded Platforms

Abstract

Modern data intensive Cyber-physical Systems ubiquitously employ heterogeneous multiprocessor systems-on chips (MPSoCs) for real-time sensing, computation, and actuation. The low foot-print of such SoCs often leads to high operating temperatures beyond acceptable limits. In this context, conventional thermal management techniques such as Operating System (OS) governed frequency scaling result in drastic degradation of the quality of experience and violation of real-time requirements. In this work, we propose an analytical thermal model for heterogeneous CPU-GPU embedded platforms and demonstrate a Model Predictive Control (MPC) based scheduling strategy with a novel heuristics-based optimization technique that leverages information about future kernels to judiciously choose suitable task mapping options for minimization of the platform's peak (or maximum) temperature to prolong chip's life span while adhering to real-time performance requirements. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers future awareness along with a variety of online task mapping control actions such as partitioning, migration, and frequency tuning in the context of thermal management in heterogeneous CPU-GPU embedded platforms. We evaluate the proposed heterogeneous framework on an Odroid-XU4 board using OpenCL based workloads and demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing the platform peak temperature.