FastCap: An Efficient and Fair Algorithm for Power Capping in Many-Core Systems

TL;DR

FastCap is a scalable, online power capping algorithm for many-core systems that optimizes performance and fairness by coordinating CPU and memory DVFS, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

We introduce FastCap, a novel optimization-based power capping approach that efficiently manages CPU and memory DVFS in many-core systems, ensuring performance and fairness.

Findings

FastCap accurately caps power draw in simulations.

FastCap improves application performance over existing methods.

FastCap promotes fairness across applications.

Abstract

Future servers will incorporate many active lowpower modes for different system components, such as cores and memory. Though these modes provide flexibility for power management via Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), they must be operated in a coordinated manner. Such coordinated control creates a combinatorial space of possible power mode configurations. Given the rapid growth of the number of cores, it is becoming increasingly challenging to quickly select the configuration that maximizes the performance under a given power budget. Prior power capping techniques do not scale well to large numbers of cores, and none of those works has considered memory DVFS. In this paper, we present FastCap, our optimization approach for system-wide power capping, using both CPU and memory DVFS. Based on a queuing model, FastCap formulates power capping as a non-linear optimization problem where we seek to maximize the system performance under a power budget, while promoting fairness across applications. Our FastCap algorithm solves the optimization online and efficiently (low complexity on the number of cores), using a small set of performance counters as input. To evaluate FastCap, we simulate it for a many-core server running different types of workloads. Our results show that FastCap caps power draw accurately, while producing better application performance and fairness than many existing CPU power capping methods (even after they are extended to use of memory DVFS as well).