DUF: Dynamic Uncore Frequency scaling to reduce power consumption

Reducing the power consumption of applications has become one of the key chal-lenges in high performance computing. Recent processor architectures differentiateprocessor core frequency from its uncore frequency. As a consequence, in addi-tion to tuning processor core frequency with DVFS, power consumption can also becontrolled through Uncore Frequency Scaling (UFS).This paper studies how the uncore frequency can be used as a leverage to improvepower consumption. We propose DUF, a daemon process that dynamically adaptsthe uncore frequency to reduce an application power consumption with a user-definedlimit on performance degradation.The evaluation of DUF on three different architectures shows that with no perfor-mance degradation (less than 0.6 %), DUF can reduce socket power consumption by7.94 %. We also show that DUF is able to reduce the total energy consumption byup to 18.20 %.

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Recommended citation: Etienne André, Remi Dulong, Amina Guermouche, François Trahay. DUF: Dynamic Uncore Fre-quency scaling to reduce power consumption. 2021.