Title
WiDGET: Wisconsin decoupled grid execution tiles
Abstract
The recent paradigm shift to multi-core systems results in high system throughput within a specified power budget. However, future systems still require good single thread performance--no longer the predominant design priority--to mitigate sequential bottlenecks and/or to guarantee service-level agreements. Unfortunately, near saturation in voltage scaling necessitates a long-term alternative to dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. We propose an energy-proportional computing infrastructure, called WiDGET, that decouples thread context management from a sea of simple execution units (EUs). WiDGET's decoupled design provides flexibility to alter resource allocation for a particular power-performance target while turning off unallocated resources. In other words, WiDGET enables dynamic customization of different combinations of small and/or powerful cores on a single chip, consuming power in proportion to the delivered performance. Over all SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks, WiDGET provides average per-thread performance that is 26% better than a Xeon-like processor while using 8% less power. WiDGET can also scale down to a level comparable to an Atom-like processor, turning off resources to reduce average power by 58%. WiDGET achieves high power efficiency (BIPS3/W), exceeding Xeon-like and Atom-like processors by up to 2x and 21x, respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1815961.1815965
Proceedings of the 40th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Keywords
Field
DocType
hardware,paradigm shift,chip,performance,power efficiency,resource allocation
Electrical efficiency,Power budget,Context management,Computer science,Parallel computing,Thread (computing),Real-time computing,Resource allocation,Frequency scaling,Throughput,Grid,Embedded system
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
38
3
0163-5964
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
30
1.57
29
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yasuko Watanabe1301.57
John D. Davis2111054.37
David A. Wood36058617.11