Towards near-threshold server processors

© Copyright 2016 IEEE. Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition (DATE) (2016. Dresden, Germany). This work has been partially supported by the YINS RTD project (no. 20NA21 150939), funded by Nano-Tera.ch with Swiss Confederation Financing and scientifically evaluated by SNSF, the EC FP7 GreenDataNet STREP project (Agreement No. 609000), the EuroLab-4-HPC project, the FP7 ERC Advance project MULTITHERMAN (g.a. 291125), the H2020 FETHPC ExaNoDe (g.a. 671578), a research scholarship by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, under contract TEC2012-33892. ; The popularity of cloud computing has led to a dramatic increase in the number of data centers in the world. The ever-increasing computational demands along with the slowdown in technology scaling has ushered an era of power-limited servers. Techniques such as near-threshold computing (NTC) can be used to improve energy efficiency in the post-Dennard scaling era. This paper describes an architecture based on the FD-SOI process technology for near-threshold operation in servers. Our work explores the trade-offs in energy and performance when running a wide range of applications found in private and public clouds, ranging from traditional scale-out applications, such as web search or media streaming, to virtualized banking applications. Our study demonstrates the benefits of near-threshold operation and proposes several directions to synergistically increase the energy proportionality of a near-threshold server. ; Depto. de Estructura de la Materia, Física Térmica y Electrónica ; Fac. de Ciencias Físicas ; TRUE ; Unión Europea. FP7 ; Unión Europea. H2020 ; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) ; YINS RTD ; Nano-Tera.ch ; Swiss Confederation Financing ; Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ; pub