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ORCID

N/A

Access Type

Open Access Thesis

Document Type

thesis

Degree Program

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Degree Type

Master of Science (M.S.)

Year Degree Awarded

2015

Month Degree Awarded

September

Abstract

Heterogeneous multicore processors offer an energy-efficient alternative to homogeneous multicores. Typically, heterogeneous multi-core refers to a system with more than one core where all the cores use a single ISA but differ in one or more micro-architectural configurations. A carefully designed multicore system consists of cores of diverse power and performance profiles. During execution, an application is run on a core that offers the best trade-off between performance and energy-efficiency. Since the resource needs of an application may vary with time, so does the optimal core choice. Moving a thread from one core to another involves transferring the entire processor state and cache warm-up. Frequent migration leads to large performance overhead, negating any benefits of migration. Infrequent migration on the other hand leads to missed opportunities. Thus, reducing overhead of migration is integral to harnessing benefits of heterogeneous multicores. \par This work proposes \textit{AdaCore}, a novel core architecture which pushes the heterogeneity exploited in the heterogeneous multicore into a single core. \textit{AdaCore} primarily addresses the resource bottlenecks in workloads. The design attempts to adaptively match the resource demands by reconfiguring on-chip resources at a fine-grain granularity. The adaptive core morphing allows core configurations with diverse power and performance profiles within a single core by adaptive voltage, frequency and resource reconfiguration. Towards this end, the proposed novel architecture while providing energy savings, improves performance with a low overhead in-core reconfiguration. This thesis further compares \textit{AdaCore} with a standard Out-of-Order core with capability to perform Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) designed to achieve energy efficiency.

The results presented in this thesis indicate that the proposed scheme can improve the performance/Watt of application, on average, by 32\% over a static out-of-order core and by 14\% over DVFS. The proposed scheme improves $IPS^{2}/Watt$ by 38\% over static out-of-order core.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/7516323

First Advisor

Sandip Kundu

Second Advisor

Israel Koren

Third Advisor

Wayne Burleson

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