Full-chip runtime error-tolerant thermal estimation and prediction for practical thermal management

Abstract

Temperature estimation and prediction are critical for online regulation of temperature and hot spots on today's high performance processors. In this paper, we present a new method, called FRETEP, to accurately estimate and predict the full-chip temperature at runtime under more practical conditions where we have inaccurate thermal model, less accurate power estimations and limited number of on-chip physical thermal sensors. FRETEP employs a number of new techniques to address this problem. First, we propose a new thermal sensor based error compensation method to correct the errors due to the inaccuracies in thermal model and power estimations. Second, we raise a new correlation based method for error compensation estimation with limited number of thermal sensors. Third, we optimize the compact modeling technique and integrate it into the error compensation process in order to perform the thermal estimation with error compensation at runtime. Last but not least, to enable accurate temperature prediction for the emerging predictive thermal management, we design a full-chip thermal prediction framework employing time series prediction method. Experimental results show FRETEP accurately estimates and predicts the full-chip thermal behavior with very low overhead introduced and compares very favorably with the Kalman filter based approach on standard SPEC benchmarks.