Energy Efficient High Performance Processors

This book explores energy efficiency techniques for high-performance computing (HPC) systems using power-management methods. Adopting a step-by-step approach, it describes power-management flows, algorithms and mechanism that are employed in modern processors such as Intel Sandy Bridge, Haswell, Skylake and other architectures (e.g. ARM). Further, it includes practical examples and recent studies demonstrating how modem processors dynamically manage wide power ranges, from a few milliwatts in the lowest idle power state, to tens of watts in turbo state. Moreover, the book explains how thermal and power deliveries are managed in the context this huge power range. The book also discusses the different metrics for energy efficiency, presents several methods and applications of the power and energy estimation, and shows how by using innovative power estimation methods and new algorithms modern processors are able to optimize metrics such as power, energy, and performance. Different power estimation tools are presented, including tools that break down the power consumption of modern processors at sub-processor core/thread granularity. The book also investigates software, firmware and hardware coordination methods of reducing power consumption, for example a compiler-assisted power management method to overcome power excursions. Lastly, it examines firmware algorithms for dynamic cache resizing and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) for memory sub-systems.

In this work, the unique power measurement capabilities of the Cray XT architecture were exploited to gain an understanding of power and energy use, and the effects of tuning both CPU and network bandwidth. Modifications were made to deterministically halt cores when idle. Additionally, capabilities were added to alter operating P-state. At the application level, an understanding of the power requirements of a range of important DOE/NNSA production scientific computing applications running at large scale is gained by simultaneously collecting current and voltage measurements on the hosting nodes. The effects of both CPU and network bandwidth tuning are examined, and energy savings opportunities without impact on run-time performance are demonstrated. This research suggests that next-generation large-scale platforms should not only approach CPU frequency scaling differently, but could also benefit from the capability to tune other platform components to achieve more energy-efficient performance.

Written by the world’s most prominent microprocessor design leaders from industry and academia, this book provides complete coverage of all aspects of complex microprocessor design: technology, power management, clocking, high-performance architecture, design methodologies, memory and I/O design, computer aided design, testing and design for testability. The chapters provide state-of-the-art knowledge while including sufficient tutorial material to bring non-experts up to speed. A useful companion to design engineers working in related areas.

As Moore's Law and Dennard scaling trends have slowed, the challenges of building high-performance computer architectures while maintaining acceptable power efficiency levels have heightened. Over the past ten years, architecture techniques for power efficiency have shifted from primarily focusing on module-level efficiencies, toward more holistic design styles based on parallelism and heterogeneity. This work highlights and synthesizes recent techniques and trends in power-efficient computer architecture. Table of Contents: Introduction / Voltage and Frequency Management / Heterogeneity and Specialization / Communication and Memory Systems / Conclusions / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies

Energy Efficient Servers: Blueprints for Data Center Optimization introduces engineers and IT professionals to the power management technologies and techniques used in energy efficient servers. The book includes a deep examination of different features used in processors, memory, interconnects, I/O devices, and other platform components. It outlines the power and performance impact of these features and the role firmware and software play in initialization and control. Using examples from cloud, HPC, and enterprise environments, the book demonstrates how various power management technologies are utilized across a range of server utilization. It teaches the reader how to monitor, analyze, and optimize their environment to best suit their needs. It shares optimization techniques used by data center administrators and system optimization experts at the world’s most advanced data centers.

This book describes a new design approach for energy-efficient, Domain-Specific Instruction set Processor (DSIP) architectures for the wireless baseband domain. The innovative techniques presented enable co-design of algorithms, architectures and technology, for efficient implementation of the most advanced technologies. To demonstrate the feasibility of the author’s design approach, case studies are included for crucial functionality of advanced wireless systems with increased computational performance, flexibility and reusability. Designers using this approach will benefit from reduced development/product costs and greater scalability to future process technology nodes.

Making IT Sustainable: Techniques and Applications delves into how energy efficiency improvements and renewable energy use in Information Technology (IT) or broader – in Information Communications Technology (ICT) – can contribute to the goal of remediating the impact of climate change. New technologies to reduce the IT carbon footprint are investigated and new methods of server high-density liquid cooling and intelligent power management in data centers are discussed. The book asks several insightful questions: How can environmentally sustainable data centers be built? How do we compare the carbon footprint of data centers versus public cloud, and cloud-focused IT sustainability standards? As growth in data traffic such as video streaming requires additional internet infrastructure, leading to higher emissions, how is this challenge being addressed and how can we improve energy efficiency in IT such as Adiabatic Reversible Computing, use of direct current, and dematerialization are discussed? For many companies and organizations, IT sustainability is becoming important in the environmental category of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This book provides actionable, practical information for IT companies to develop their IT sustainability programs. IT directors and managers responsible for these programs will find the book useful. As pros and cons of various technology solutions for achieving IT sustainability are critically reviewed in detail, the book can serve as a practical guide for IT professionals working on implementing IT sustainability solutions. Presents various initiatives to address IT sustainability, looking at approaches for improving energy efficiency in IT such as Adiabatic Reversible Computing, use of direct current, and dematerialization Focuses on the design of sustainable IT systems and aims to be solution oriented Reviews innovations in software development that contribute to GHG emission reductions such as Rust programming language Investigates innovations in data center technologies, green software, adiabatic reversible computing, and cloud computing

This book describes how we can design and make efficient processors for high-performance computing, AI, and data science. Although there are many textbooks on the design of processors we do not have a widely accepted definition of the efficiency of a general-purpose computer architecture. Without a definition of the efficiency, it is difficult to make scientific approach to the processor design. In this book, a clear definition of efficiency is given and thus a scientific approach for processor design is made possible. In chapter 2, the history of the development of high-performance processor is overviewed, to discuss what quantity we can use to measure the efficiency of these processors. The proposed quantity is the ratio between the minimum possible energy consumption and the actual energy consumption for a given application using a given semiconductor technology. In chapter 3, whether or not this quantity can be used in practice is discussed, for many real-world applications. In chapter 4, general-purpose processors in the past and present are discussed from this viewpoint. In chapter 5, how we can actually design processors with near-optimal efficiencies is described, and in chapter 6 how we can program such processors. This book gives a new way to look at the field of the design of high-performance processors.