Title
A Lightweight Nonlinear Methodology to Accurately Model Multicore Processor Power
Abstract
Many power management algorithms demand accurate and fine-grained runtime estimations of dynamic core power. In the absence of fine-grained power sensors, model-based estimations are needed. Such power models commonly approximate the switching activity of logic gates using performance counters while assuming a linear performance counter/power relation at a fixed frequency and voltage. It has been shown that this relation cannot be captured accurately enough with purely linear models and that well-established nonlinear modeling techniques, e.g., polynomial modeling, easily overfit the underlying performance/power relations. Although neural-network-based modeling has shown to accurately capture nonlinear relations, it has a large training and inference overhead which is too high for fine-grained models on core-level and estimation rates in the range of 1-10 kHz. We propose a methodology for nonlinear transformation of specific performance counters to increase power modeling accuracy at constant frequency and voltage with a relatively low overhead for both model generation and run-time application over a linear model. Furthermore, we use least-angle regression (LARS) to determine a ranking of the performance counter inputs for use in linear and nonlinear modeling and show that the transformed performance counters are better suited for power modeling. The generated dynamic power model consisting of a nonlinear transformation block and a linear regression block reduces relative estimation error on average by 4% and in worst-case scenarios by 7% compared to state-of-the-art fine-grained linear power models. Compared to a state-of-the-art polynomial regression model our proposed approach reduces the relative estimation error by 10% in worst-case scenarios.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TCAD.2020.3013062
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Multicore processor system,nonlinear,performance counters,power modeling and estimation,prediction
Journal
39
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
11
0278-0070
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mark Sagi121.84
Nguyen Anh Vu Doan222.06
Martin Rapp364.83
Thomas Wild412425.65
J. Henkel54471366.50
Andreas Herkersdorf670388.32