seBoost: Selective boosting for heterogeneous manycores

Abstract

Boosting techniques have been widely adopted in commercial multicore and manycore systems, mainly because they provide means to satisfy performance requirements surges, for one or more cores, at run-time. Current boosting techniques select the boosting levels (for boosted cores) and the throttle-down levels (for non-boosted cores) either arbitrarily or through step-wise control approaches. These methods might result in unnecessary performance losses for the non-boosted cores, in short boosting intervals, in failing to satisfy the required performance surges, or in unnecessary high power and energy consumption. This paper presents an efficient and lightweight run-time boosting technique based on transient temperature estimation, called seBoost. Our technique guarantees meeting the performance requirements surges at run-time, thus maximizing the boosting time with a minimum loss of performance for the non-boosted cores.