Performance-Aware Thermal Management via Task Scheduling

High on-chip temperature impairs the processor's reliability and reduces its lifetime. Hardwarelevel dynamic thermal management (DTM) techniques can effectively constrain the chip temperature, but degrades the performance. We propose an OS-level technique that performs thermalaware job scheduling to reduce DTMs. The algorithm is based on the observation that hot and cool jobs executed in a different order can make a difference in resulting temperature. Real-system implementation in Linux shows that our scheduler can remove 10.5% to 73.6% of the hardware DTMs in a medium thermal environment. The CPU throughput is improved by up to 7.6% (4.1%, on average) in a severe thermal environment. © 2010, ACM. All rights reserved.