P-EdgeCoolingMode: An Agent Based Performance Aware Thermal Management Unit for DVFS Enabled Heterogeneous MPSoCs

Thermal cycling as well as spatial and thermal gradient affects the lifetime reliability and performance of heterogeneous multiprocessor systems-on-chips (MPSoCs). Conventional temperature management techniques are not intelligent enough to cater for performance, energy efficiency as well as operating temperature of the system. In this paper we propose a light-weight novel thermal management mechanism (P-EdgeCoolingMode) in the form of intelligent software agent, which monitors and regulates the operating temperature of the CPU cores to improve reliability of the system while catering for performance requirements. P-EdgeCoolingMode is capable of pro-actively monitoring performance and based on the user’s demand the agent takes necessary action, making the proposed methodology highly suitable for implementation on existing as well as conceptual Edge devices utilizing heterogeneous MPSoCs with dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) capabilities. We validated our methodology on the Odroid-XU4 MPSoC and Huawei P20 Lite (HiSilicon Kirin 659 MPSoC). P-EdgeCoolingMode has been successful to reduce the operating temperature while improving performance and reducing power consumption for chosen test cases than the state-of-the-art. For applications with demanding performance requirement P-EdgeCoolingMode has been found to improve the power consumption by 30.62% at the most in comparison to existing state-of-the-art power management methodologies.