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Architectural Solutions For Mitigating Voltage Noise in GPUs

Thomas, Renji George George

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Computer Science and Engineering.
Power efficiency, over the last several years, has become a first class design constraint. New architectures that make use of Single Instruction Multiple Data philosophy are a pow- erful medium to achieve large performance per watt. However, these architectures are facing the same ’Power Wall’ that the general purpose CPU architectures are dealing with. Dennard scaling has plateaued out, the primary reason for this is that supply voltage reduc- tion is harder to achieve. Several reliability challenges have also risen out of power delivery network limits, transistor threshold voltage variation, cooling, and many more. We propose solutions to improve reliability, and increase power efficiency in general purpose GPUs. We analyze resonant voltage noise events in GPUs. We then propose micro-architectural solutions, to remove resonant patterns in GPUs. We make use of the many threads that are available to do useful work while disrupting resonant patterns. Doing so, helps us reduce voltage margins needed and cause a 15% reduction in power cost. We then study the combined effects of systematic process variation, and voltage noise in GPUs. The heterogeneity introduced by process variation can be exploited to reduce power consumption. We propose a solution that uses a fast protection mechanism against voltage noise events which cause compute errors or memory corruption. This protection is leveraged to speculate on the amount of margin that can be dynamically reduced. With both these methods up to 20% reduction in energy is achieved.
Radu Teodores (Advisor)
Feng Qin (Committee Member)
Gagan Aggarwal (Committee Member)
105 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Thomas, R. G. G. (2015). Architectural Solutions For Mitigating Voltage Noise in GPUs [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1449251893

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Thomas, Renji George. Architectural Solutions For Mitigating Voltage Noise in GPUs. 2015. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1449251893.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Thomas, Renji George. "Architectural Solutions For Mitigating Voltage Noise in GPUs." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1449251893

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)