ControlPULP: A RISC-V On-Chip Parallel Power Controller for Many-Core HPC Processors with FPGA-Based Hardware-In-The-Loop Power and Thermal Emulation

High-performance computing (HPC) processors are nowadays integrated cyber-physical systems demanding complex and high-bandwidth closed-loop power and thermal control strategies. To efficiently satisfy real-time multi-input multi-output (MIMO) optimal power requirements, high-end processors integrate...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of parallel programming Vol. 52; no. 1-2; pp. 93 - 123
Main Authors: Ottaviano, Alessandro, Balas, Robert, Bambini, Giovanni, Del Vecchio, Antonio, Ciani, Maicol, Rossi, Davide, Benini, Luca, Bartolini, Andrea
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Springer US 01.04.2024
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Algorithms
Closed loops
Clusters
Computer Science
Control algorithms
Control theory
Controllers
Cyber-physical systems
Field programmable gate arrays
Hardware-in-the-loop simulation
Microprocessors
MIMO (control systems)
Power control
Power management
Processor Architectures
Reactive power
Real time
RISC
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Theory of Computation
Thermal design
RISC-V
HPC processor
PULP
Power and thermal control
Scalable
Parallel microcontroller
ISSN:0885-7458, 1573-7640
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:High-performance computing (HPC) processors are nowadays integrated cyber-physical systems demanding complex and high-bandwidth closed-loop power and thermal control strategies. To efficiently satisfy real-time multi-input multi-output (MIMO) optimal power requirements, high-end processors integrate an on-die power controller system (PCS). While traditional PCSs are based on a simple microcontroller (MCU)-class core, more scalable and flexible PCS architectures are required to support advanced MIMO control algorithms for managing the ever-increasing number of cores, power states, and process, voltage, and temperature variability. This paper presents ControlPULP, an open-source, HW/SW RISC-V parallel PCS platform consisting of a single-core MCU with fast interrupt handling coupled with a scalable multi-core programmable cluster accelerator and a specialized DMA engine for the parallel acceleration of real-time power management policies. ControlPULP relies on FreeRTOS to schedule a reactive power control firmware (PCF) application layer. We demonstrate ControlPULP in a power management use-case targeting a next-generation 72-core HPC processor. We first show that the multi-core cluster accelerates the PCF, achieving 4.9x speedup compared to single-core execution, enabling more advanced power management algorithms within the control hyper-period at a shallow area overhead, about 0.1% the area of a modern HPC CPU die. We then assess the PCS and PCF by designing an FPGA-based, closed-loop emulation framework that leverages the heterogeneous SoCs paradigm, achieving DVFS tracking with a mean deviation within 3% the plant’s thermal design power (TDP) against a software-equivalent model-in-the-loop approach. Finally, we show that the proposed PCF compares favorably with an industry-grade control algorithm under computational-intensive workloads.
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ISSN:0885-7458
1573-7640
DOI:10.1007/s10766-024-00761-4