PTSMT: A Tool for Cross-Level Power, Performance, and Thermal Exploration of SMT Processors

Abstract

Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) processors are becoming popular because they exploit both instruction-level and thread- level parallelism by issuing instructions from different threads in the same cycle. However, the issues of power and thermal management hinder SMT processors fabricated in nano-scale technologies. Power and thermal issues in SMT processors not only limit the achievable performance, but also have a direct impact on the cost and viability of these processors. While several performance simulation tools to explore the performance aspect of SMT processors early in their design phase exist, there is a lack of early power and performance evaluation tools for SMT processors. To this end, we have developed PTSMT: a tightly coupled power, performance and thermal exploration tool for SMT processors. In this paper, we demonstrate that PTSMT can automatically and effectively accomplish power, performance and thermal exploration of SMT processors at various levels of design hierarchy, at the application level, microarchitecture level, and physical level. Our experimental results show that: at the application level, number of contexts into which an application is divided could affect performance by 2.2times, energy by 52%, and peak temperature by 35degC; and at the microarchitecture level, context swapping during run time could reduce energy by 9% and improve performance by 8%. These observations indicate the size of the design space which can be explored using PTSMT.