Sumit K. Mandal

Sumit K. Mandal, Umit Y. Ogras, Janardhan Rao Doppa et al.

Dynamic resource management has become one of the major areas of research in modern computer and communication system design due to lower power consumption and higher performance demands. The number of integrated cores, level of heterogeneity and amount of control knobs increase steadily. As a result, the system complexity is increasing faster than our ability to optimize and dynamically manage the resources. Moreover, offline approaches are sub-optimal due to workload variations and large volume of new applications unknown at design time. This paper first reviews recent online learning techniques for predicting system performance, power, and temperature. Then, we describe the use of predictive models for online control using two modern approaches: imitation learning (IL) and an explicit nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC). Evaluations on a commercial mobile platform with 16 benchmarks show that the IL approach successfully adapts the control policy to unknown applications. The explicit NMPC provides 25% energy savings compared to a state-of-the-art algorithm for multi-variable power management of modern GPU sub-systems.

Sumit K. Mandal, Ganapati Bhat, Janardhan Rao Doppa et al.

Mobile platforms must satisfy the contradictory requirements of fast response time and minimum energy consumption as a function of dynamically changing applications. To address this need, system-on-chips (SoC) that are at the heart of these devices provide a variety of control knobs, such as the number of active cores and their voltage/frequency levels. Controlling these knobs optimally at runtime is challenging for two reasons. First, the large configuration space prohibits exhaustive solutions. Second, control policies designed offline are at best sub-optimal since many potential new applications are unknown at design-time. We address these challenges by proposing an online imitation learning approach. Our key idea is to construct an offline policy and adapt it online to new applications to optimize a given metric (e.g., energy). The proposed methodology leverages the supervision enabled by power-performance models learned at runtime. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a commercial mobile platform with 16 diverse benchmarks. Our approach successfully adapts the control policy to an unknown application after executing less than 25% of its instructions.