Brief Announcement: Energy Optimization of Memory Intensive Parallel Workloads

Energy consumption is an important concern in modern multicore processors. The energy consumed during the execution of an application can be minimized by tuning the hardware state utilizing knobs such as frequency, voltage etc. The existing theoretical work on energy minimization using Global DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling), despite being thorough, ignores the energy consumed by the CPU on memory accesses and the dynamic energy consumed by the idle cores. This article presents an analytical energy-performance model for parallel workloads that accounts for the energy consumed by the CPU chip on memory accesses in addition to the energy consumed on CPU instructions. In addition, the model we present also accounts for the dynamic energy consumed by the idle cores. We present an analytical framework around our energy-performance model to predict the operating frequencies for global DVFS that minimize the overall CPU energy consumption. We show how the optimal frequencies in our model differ from the optimal frequencies in a model that does not account for memory accesses.