Flexible Framework for Dynamic Management of Multi-Core Systems

In this paper, we propose a dynamic management framework for multi-core systems. Power management and temperature control are two crucial components for multi-core system control. Therefore, in this paper we propose a flexible and scalable framework which is very effective in reducing the power consumption and the temperature by adjusting the number of active cores on a Linux-based multi-core system. To manage the states of a multi-core system, both dynamic power management (DPM) and dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS) can be selectively applied depending on the type of cores. So unnecessary cores can be shut down or idling cores can be slowed down. To show the effectiveness and flexibility of our framework, we implemented the framework on both Intel Centrino Duo and ARM-11 MPCore platforms. By conducting various experiments with the proposed framework, we could successfully reduce the power consumption and the temperature.