Energy Efficiency of a Multi-Core Processor by Tag Reduction

作     者：郑龙 董冕雄 Kaoru Ota 金海 Song Guo 马俊 

作者机构：School of Computer Science and Technology Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wuhan 430074 China School of Computer Science and Engineering The University of Aizu Aizu-Wakamatsu 965-8580 Japan Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Waterloo N2L 3G1 Canada Department of Computer Science and Engineering Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai 200240 China 

出 版 物：《Journal of Computer Science & Technology》 (计算机科学技术学报（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2011年第26卷第3期

页      面：491-503页

核心收录：

学科分类：1305[艺术学-设计学（可授艺术学、工学学位）] 1304[艺术学-美术学] 13[艺术学] 08[工学] 0835[工学-软件工程] 081201[工学-计算机系统结构] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 

基　　金：supported by the National Basic Research 973 Program of China under Grant No. 2007CB310900 the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60725208 Fellowships of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciencefor Young Scientists Program 

主　　题：tag reduction multi-core processor energy efficiency 

摘      要：We consider the energy saving problem for caches on a multi-core processor. In the previous research on low power processors, there are various methods to reduce power dissipation. Tag reduction is one of them. This paper extends the tag reduction technique on a single-core processor to a multi-core processor and investigates the potential of energy saving for multi-core processors. We formulate our approach as an equivalent problem which is to find an assignment of the whole instruction pages in the physical memory to a set of cores such that the tag-reduction conflicts for each core can be mostly avoided or reduced. We then propose three algorithms using different heuristics for this assignment problem. We provide convincing experimental results by collecting experimental data from a real operating system instead of the traditional way using a processor simulator that cannot simulate operating system functions and the full memory hierarchy. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms can save total energy up to 83.93% on an 8-core processor and 76.16% on a 4-core processor in average compared to the one that the tag-reduction is not used for. They also significantly outperform the tag reduction based algorithm on a single-core processor.