The Case for Cross-Component Power Coordination on Power Bounded Systems

Modern computer systems are increasingly bounded by the available or permissible power at multiple layers, ranging from a single chip to an entire data center. To cope with this reality, it is necessary to understand how power bounds impact the design and performance of emergent computer systems. In this paper, we study the problem of coordinated power allocation between processors and memory modules on power-bounded systems. We experimentally and analytically investigate the dynamics between cross-component power allocation and application performance, identify the patterns of power allocation scenarios, and develop optimal power allocation methods. In our study, we discover that (1) different applications share categorical patterns with regard to how power allocations among individual components impact application performance and actual power, (2) the per-node power budget must exceed a certain threshold in order to achieve desirable performance and efficiency, (3) there exist workload-specific optimal power allocations under a given power budget and such optimal power coordination can be pinpointed using the heuristics derived from the categorical patterns and a light-weight power-performance profiling. Results from this study demonstrate the importance and feasibility of cross-component coordination to the implementation of power-bound high performance computing technology.