ThermOS: system support for dynamic thermal management of chip multi-processors

Constraining the temperature of computing systems has become a dominant aspect in the design of integrated circuits. The supply voltage decrease has lost its pace even though the feature size is shrinking constantly. This results in an increased number of transistors per unit of area and hence a growing power density. Researchers started investigating dynamic thermal management techniques to address the trade-off between performance and temperature. Hardware dynamic thermal management can guarantee safety but, at the same time, can negatively affect established service-level agreements. On the other hand, software solutions rely on hardware for safety but does not indiscriminately trade-off performance for temperature. We propose ThermOS, an extension for commodity operating systems that harnesses formal feedback control and idle cycle injection to decrease thermal emergencies while showing better efficiency than commodity and cutting edge techniques.