Publications by Author: Brooks, David M

In this paper, we characterize the impact of compiler optimizations on voltage noise. While intuition may suggest that the better processor utilization ensured by optimizing compilers results in a small amount of voltage variation, our measurements on a IntelR CoreTM2 Duo processor show the opposite – the majority of SPEC 2006 benchmarks exhibit more voltage droops when aggressively optimized. We show that this increase in noise could be sufficient for a net performance decrease in a typicalcase, resilient design.

Supply voltage fluctuations that result from inductive noise are increasingly troublesome in modern microprocessors. A voltage “emergency”, i.e., a swing beyond tolerable operating margins, jeopardizes the safe and correct operation of the processor. Techniques aimed at reducing power consumption, e.g., by clock gating or by reducing nominal supply voltage, exacerbate this noise problem, requiring ever-wider operating margins. We propose an event-guided, adaptive method for avoiding voltage emergencies, which exploits the fact that most emergencies are correlated with unique microarchitectural events, such as cache misses or the pipeline flushes that follow branch mispredictions. Using checkpoint and rollback to handle unavoidable emergencies, our method adapts dynamically by learning to trigger avoidance mechanisms when emergency-prone events recur. After tightening supply voltage margins to increase clock frequency and accounting for all costs, the net result is a performance improvement of 8% across a suite of fifteen SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks.