Evaluation of Automatic Power Reduction with OSCAR Compiler on Intel Haswell and ARM Cortex-A9 Multicores

Abstract

Reducing power dissipation without performance degradation is one of the most important issues for all computing systems, such as supercomputers, cloud servers, desktop PCs, medical systems, smart-phones and wearable devices. Exploiting parallelism, careful frequency-and-voltage control and clock-and-power-gating control for multicore/manycore systems are promising to attain performance improvements and reducing power dissipation. However, the hand parallelization and power reduction of application programs are very difficult and time-consuming. The OSCAR automatic parallelization compiler has been developed to overcome these problems by realizing automatic low-power control in addition to the parallelization. This paper evaluates performance of the low-power control technology of the OSCAR compiler on Intel Haswell and ARM multicore platforms. The evaluations show that the power consumption is reduced to 2/5 using 3 cores on the Intel Haswell multicore for the H.264 decoder and 1/3 for Optical Flow on 3 cores with the power control compared with 3 cores without power control. On the ARM Cortex-A9 using 3 cores, the power control reduces power consumption to 1/2 with the H.264 decoder and 1/3 with Optical Flow. These show that the OSCAR multi-platform compiler allows us to reduce the power consumption on Intel and ARM multicores.