GEMSCLAIM: GreenEr Mobile Systems by Cross LAyer Integrated energy Management

Lead Research Organisation: Queen's University Belfast
Department Name: Sch of Electronics, Elec Eng & Comp Sci

Abstract

Personal computing currently faces a rapid trend from desktop machines towards mobile services, accessed via tablets, smartphones and similar terminal devices. With respect to computing power, today 's handheld devices are similar to Cray-2 supercomputers from the 1980s. Due to higher computational load (e.g. via multimedia apps) and the variety of radio interfaces (such as WiFi, 3G, and LTE), modern terminals are getting increasingly energy hungry. For instance, a single UMTS upload or a video recording process on today 's smartphones may consume as much as 1.5 Watts, i.e. roughly 50% of the maximal device power. In the near future, higher data rates and traffic, advanced media codecs, and graphics applications will ask for even more energy than the battery can deliver. At the same time, the power density limit might lead to a significant share of "Dark Silicon" at 22nm CMOS and below. Obviously, disruptive energy optimizations are required that go well beyond traditional technologies like DVFS (dynamic voltage and frequency scaling) and power-down of temporarily unused components. The GEMSCLAIM project aims at introducing novel approaches for reducing this "greed for energy", thereby improving the user experience and enabling new opportunities for mobile computing. The focus is on three novel approaches: (1) cross layer energy optimization, ranging from the compiler over the operating system down to the target HW platform, (2) efficient programming support for energy-optimized heterogeneous Multicore platforms based on energy-aware service level agreements (SLAs) and energy-sensitive tunable parameters, and (3) introducing energy awareness into Virtual Platforms for the purpose of dynamically customizing the HW architecture for energy optimization and online energy monitoring and accounting. GEMSCLAIM will provide new methodologies and tools in these domains and will quantify the potential energy savings via benchmarks and a HW platform prototype.

Planned Impact

GEMSCLAIM aims at a paradigm shift from throughput-oriented to energy-oriented parallel computing. The performance of computing systems is already defined by the available power, yet most layers of the HW/SW stack of modern systems are optimized without power considerations. GEMSCLAIM will develop methods and tools for energy-aware optimization throughout the HW and SW stack.

Parallel programming already faces major challenges in dealing with the increasing diversity and heterogeneity of parallel architectures. These challenges will only grow larger as energy will become the main limitation in future architectures. GEMSCLAIM involves the programmer in energy management, through OpenMP+ directives that assist in energy conservation by parallel programs. At the same time, GEMSCLAIM implements a high-productivity parallel programming environment based on OpenMP+, which effectively supports heterogeneous Multicore platforms.

GEMSCLAIM makes energy a first-class citizen in computing systems, by developing a HW/SW environment that manages energy as a resource that is equally critical as other resources, such as processor time and memory space. GEMSCLAIM also advocates a fundamental departure from the current fragmented models of energy management in computing systems. The GEMSCLAIM HW/SW environment develops holistic energy optimization by controlling a multitude of tunable HW and SW parameters and leveraging dynamic workload properties.

All partners of GEMSCLAIM are active and prolific members of the HiPEAC European Network of Excellence. One of the project's principal investigators is also a contributor of the 2012 HiPEAC Roadmap (http://www.hipeac.net/system/files/hipeac-roadmap2011.pdf). GEMSCLAIM responds to the two major future challenges identified by the HiPEAC Roadmap: Efficiency, "measured as the amount of computation that we can accomplish per unit of energy" and Complexity "which identifies the need to provide tools and techniques for enabling developers of SW and new HW to leverage increasingly complex systems for increasingly complex applications". GEMSCLAIM also responds to the societal challenges of environmental protection and productivity: Computing systems are a part of the growing energy problem, consuming hundreds of Gigajoules of energy annually (about as much as civil aviation). Computing systems are also an essential ingredient of productivity in all aspects of human economic activity.

For the successful dissemination of the GEMSCLAIM's scientific and technical outcomes, dissemination activities run in parallel with project management coordinating the various activities concerned with successive knowledge transfer. Disseminating GEMSCLAIM achievements is an integral part of all work-packages and a responsibility for all participants. Integrity and consistency of all dissemination efforts are to be supervised in WP1.

The strategy will aim at getting in touch with target audience with recognizable, clear and effective messages able to communicate project vision and achievements as well as to stimulate the interest in project technology and objectives. The specific objectives of the strategy are the
- share scientific results with the international community
- increase awareness of scientific and technological benefits of the targeted results
- inform potential users of project achievements and prepare the way for exploitation
- establish scientific and business relationships with institutions and companies involved in the same technological domain or potential users of the project outcomes
- spread results within established networks, e.g. through workshops, concertation events.
 
Description In 2017 the research team of the GEMSCLAIM project engaged with CreVinn Teoranta, an ASIC/FPGA design and verification company based in Galway, Ireland. CreVinn has been instrumental in the development of many pioneering ASICs and IP cores for market leading products. These cover a wide range of networking and computing applications such as Layer-N Switches, Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controllers, Hardware Accelerators for network processing tasks, Encryption and Wireless cores, High Speed Interprocessor Bus Switches, and a wide range of SoCs for the industrial, automotive and home markets. The Queen's team transferred knowledge on OpenCL programming and runtime support for FPGA environments. The effort was recognised with a certificate of excellence from InterTrade Ireland. The knowledge transfer also asserted the viability of emerging FPGA technologies for datacenters, thanks to improved programmability via high-level parallel programming languages such as OpenCL. The runtime system technology developed under the GEMSCLAIM project has been deployed as an underpinning method for two widely used parallel programming language standards (MPI and OpenMP). The technology, nicknamed SCALO, provides transparent adaptation and automatic scaling of scientific software on current and emerging hardware. The technology enables substantial efficiency savings, both in terms of software productivity and in terms of cost of operation of large-scale computational science facilities at the Science and Technology Facilities Council.
First Year Of Impact 2017
Sector Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)
Impact Types Economic

 
Description ALEA: Abstraction-Level Energy Accounting and Optimisation for Many-core Programming Languages
Amount £394,026 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/L000555/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 01/2014 
End 12/2016
 
Description Distributed Heterogeneous Vertically IntegrateD ENergy Efficient Data centres
Amount £140,710 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/M015742/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 01/2015 
End 12/2017
 
Description ENPOWER; Energy-Proportional Computing with Heterogeneous and Reconfigurable Processors
Amount £348,325 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/L004232/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 09/2013 
End 09/2016
 
Description EU Horizon2020 Programme: ECOSCALE: Energy-Efficient Heterogeneous Computing at Scale
Amount € 696,750 (EUR)
Funding ID 671632 
Organisation European Commission 
Sector Public
Country European Union (EU)
Start 09/2015 
End 09/2018
 
Description EU Horizon2020 Programme: RAPID Heterogeneous Secure Multi-level Remote Acceleration Service for Low-Power Integrated Systems and Devices
Amount € 326,925 (EUR)
Funding ID 644312 
Organisation European Commission 
Sector Public
Country European Union (EU)
Start 01/2015 
End 12/2017
 
Description EU Horizon2020 Programme: UniServer Project
Amount € 663,625 (EUR)
Funding ID 687628 
Organisation European Commission 
Sector Public
Country European Union (EU)
Start 02/2016 
End 01/2019
 
Description EU Horizon2020 Programme: Vineyard Project
Amount € 4,815,810 (EUR)
Funding ID 688540 
Organisation European Commission 
Sector Public
Country European Union (EU)
Start 02/2016 
End 01/2019
 
Description Heterogeneous parallel and distributed computing with Java
Amount £221,592 (GBP)
Funding ID EP/M015750/1 
Organisation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 01/2015 
End 12/2017
 
Description Horizon2020 Programme
Amount € 5,999,510 (EUR)
Funding ID H2020-732631 
Organisation European Commission 
Sector Public
Country European Union (EU)
Start 01/2017 
End 12/2020
 
Description SCORPIO: SIgnificance-Based Computing for Reliability and Power Optimization
Amount £220,000 (GBP)
Funding ID FP7-323872 
Organisation European Commission 
Sector Public
Country European Union (EU)
Start 05/2013 
End 05/2016
 
Description Collaboration with ARM and Applied Micro on micro-servers operating with extended voltage/frequency margins 
Organisation Arm Limited
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution New resource management methods at the operating system & hypervisor levels for leveraging extended operating margins of 64-bit ARM processors to improve system-wide energy-efficiency in micro-servers.
Collaborator Contribution Donation of experimental boards from Applied Micro (XGene) and ARM (Juno).
Impact Ongoing development of variation-aware hypervisors with enhanced resilience, power management and performance management capabilities.
Start Year 2016
 
Description Collaboration with ARM on fine-grain energy accounting tools 
Organisation Arm Limited
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution Partnership with ARM on developing energy-efficient system software and methods for accurate and fine-grain energy accounting in the Linux operating system. Our research team has contributed new probabilistic models for energy accounting at time scales which are finer than the power sensing or sampling periods of on-chip or off-chip power sensing instruments.
Collaborator Contribution ARM has scoped this collaboration and contributed in an advisory role via a series of online and face-to-face meetings with the ALEA, ENPOWER and GEMSCLAIM project consortia.
Impact Thread-level energy accounting tools for ARM Big.Little platforms (e.g. Exynos) and their use in energy-aware scheduling and resource allocation on mobile devices are currently in implementation and preliminary evaluation stages.
Start Year 2016
 
Description Credit Suisse 
Organisation Credit Suisse Group
Country Switzerland 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution Partnership with Credit Suisse explores design methods and tools to reduce the carbon and space footprint of datacentres that serve real-time financial analytics applications in London.
Collaborator Contribution The partner contributed time equivalent to 0.1FTE over a year to engage in meetings and a joint experimental campaign to evaluate tools developed in the context of the ALEA (EP/L000055/1,) ENPOWER (EP/L004232/1) and GEMSCLAIM (EP/K017594/1) projects.
Impact The collaboration has resulted in dissemination of datacentre energy measurement, energy accounting, and energy optimisation methods explored within the ALEA (EP/L000055/1), ENPOWER (EP/L004232/1) and GEMSCLAIM (EP/L017594/1) projects among stakeholders in the capital markets, as well as a preliminary evaluation of energy-efficient micro-servers based on heterogeneous many-core architectures and the ARM ecosystem, as an alternative to heavily overprovisioned servers in financial datacentres.
Start Year 2014
 
Title ALEA Energy Accounting Tool 
Description The ALEA profiler is a cross-platform statistical profiling tool for Linux, which provides time and energy profiling at the basic block level on Intel and ARM architectures (32 and 64 bit). Energy profiling is available for platforms with energy or power meters. Currently, ALEA supports all Intel platforms with enabled RAPL interface and ARM-based Odoroid-XU/Odroid-XU3 platforms. The tool can be used for profiling both sequential and multi-threaded applications. Energy and execution time accounting to source code is also supported for applications compiled with debugging information (DWARF). 
Type Of Technology Software 
Year Produced 2017 
Open Source License? Yes  
Impact ALEA is actively used by a number of groups in the UK and the US (e.g. Edinburgh, Lancaster, Virginia Tech, Old Dominion University) to perform targeted, energy-aware code optimisation on high-end computing systems. 
URL https://hpdc-gitlab.eeecs.qub.ac.uk/lmukhanov/alea-release.git