Using Performance Counters for Runtime Temperature Sensing

As energy consumption in high-performance systems has increased, thermal management has become a big chal-lenge. Providing a cost-effective and detailed temperature sensing mechanism is crucial to effectively employ a ther-mal management technique. Existing hardware sensors are too costly to implement and add additional heat while soft-ware simulations fail to account for all possible hardware effects. In this paper, we describe a software solution for temper-ature sensing that uses real hardware resources such as per-formance counters. The resulting temperature model pro-vides a detailed spatial gradient of the processor and exe-cutes at runtime. In particular, the model is configured for the Pentium 4 processor. We run SPEC2000 benchmarks to analyze the thermal behavior of applications and explain the potential benefits of using our model for temperature-aware research. 1