Power–thermal profiling of software applications

Power consumption and heat dissipation are becoming the major factors that limit the performance evolution of current state-of-the-art microprocessors. As they become key elements in the design of both high performance computers and battery powered devices, different power and thermal management strategies have been proposed and implemented during the last years in order to overcome this performance limitation. Considering that software applications have a large impact on power consumption and thermal map of the CPU cores, these design strategies tend to be addressed at higher levels even as they are usually implemented at lower levels of systems abstraction. The work presented in this paper evaluates the relation between power consumption and thermal response of CPU cores when different software applications are executed. The goal of this study is to identify how software applications can be used in thermal management process and whether it is feasible to implement thermal-aware software applications.