TRINITY: Coordinated Performance, Energy and Temperature Management in 3D Processor-Memory Stacks

TL;DR

TRINITY is a real-time controller that optimizes performance, energy, and temperature in 3D processor-memory stacks, leading to significant improvements in energy efficiency and thermal management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coordinated management approach and a real-time optimization controller for 3D stacks, addressing complex multiphysics interactions.

Findings

Up to 30% improvement in Energy Delay^2 Product.

Up to 8 Kelvin lower core temperatures.

Enhanced reliability with 59% lifetime increase.

Abstract

The consistent demand for better performance has lead to innovations at hardware and microarchitectural levels. 3D stacking of memory and logic dies delivers an order of magnitude improvement in available memory bandwidth. The price paid however is, tight thermal constraints. In this paper, we study the complex multiphysics interactions between performance, energy and temperature. Using a cache coherent multicore processor cycle level simulator coupled with power and thermal estimation tools, we investigate the interactions between (a) thermal behaviors (b) compute and memory microarchitecture and (c) application workloads. The key insights from this exploration reveal the need to manage performance, energy and temperature in a coordinated fashion. Furthermore, we identify the concept of "effective heat capacity" i.e. the heat generated beyond which no further gains in performance is observed with increases in voltage-frequency of the compute logic. Subsequently, a real-time, numerical optimization based, application agnostic controller (TRINITY) is developed which intelligently manages the three parameters of interest. We observe up to $30\%$ improvement in Energy Delay$^2$ Product and up to $8$ Kelvin lower core temperatures as compared to fixed frequencies. Compared to the \texttt{ondemand} Linux CPU DVFS governor, for similar energy efficiency, TRINITY keeps the cores cooler by $6$ Kelvin which increases the lifetime reliability by up to 59\%.