Events & News
Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Thursday, March 4, 2010 |
| Time | 3:30 pm |
| Location | GS 942 |
| Details | The committee members are: Chair: David K. Lowenthal Bronis R. de Supinski Shelby Funk John Hartman Chris Gniady |
| Speaker | Barry Rountree |
| Title | PhD Final Defense |
| Affiliation | Computer Science Department |
Theory and Practice of Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling in the High Performance Computing Environment
Abstract: This dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling (DVFS) in the High Performance Computing (HPC) environment. We summarize the overall problem as follows: how can the same level of computational performance be achieved using less electrical power? Equivalently, how can computational performance be increased using the same amount of electrical power? In this dissertation we present performance and architecture models of DVFS as well as the Adagio runtime system.
The performance model recasts the question as an optimization problem that we solve using linear programming, thus establishing a bound on potential energy savings. The architectural model provides a low-level explanation of how memory bus and CPU clock frequencies interact to determine execution time. Using insights provided from these models, we have designed and implemented the Adagio runtime system. This system realizes near-optimal energy savings on real-world scientific applications without the use of training runs or source code modification. This work has opened up several new avenues of research, and we conclude this dissertation by enumerating these.