Maximizing Performance under a Power Constraint on Modern Multicore Systems

Energy efficiency and energy-proportional computing have become a central focus in modern supercomputers. These supercomputers should provide high throughput per unit of power to be sustainable in terms of operating cost and failure rates. In this paper, a power-bounded strategy is proposed that maximizes parallel application performance under a given power constraint. The strategy dynamically allocates power to core, uncore, and memory power domains within a node to maximize performance under a given power budget. Experiments on a 20-core Haswell-EP platform for a real-world parallel application GAMESS demonstrate that the proposed strategy delivers performance within 4% of the best possible performance for as much as 25% reduction in the minimum power budget required for maximum performance.