用离线强化学习优化CPU功耗,提升能效且不影响性能。
Offline Reinforcement-Learning-Based Power Control for Application-Agnostic Energy Efficiency
- 通过离线RL利用历史数据训练功率控制器
- 实测在多种基准测试中降低能耗,性能损失可控
- 适合需要实时能效优化的系统级应用
能效已成为现代计算基础设施设计的核心要素,影响系统性能、成本、可扩展性和耐久性。现代CPU设计中集成的功耗控制与感知能力,使系统软件可在运行时主动监控并调节能耗与性能。尽管强化学习(RL)看似适用于此类能效控制系统的设计,但在线训练面临缺乏理想仿真环境模型、在真实系统上训练时扰动(噪声)和可靠性问题等挑战。本文探讨了采用离线强化学习作为替代方案,设计自主的CPU功耗控制器,目标是在不显著影响性能的前提下提升并行应用的运行时能效。离线RL通过利用事先收集的任意策略生成的状态转移数据集进行训练,规避了在线训练的问题。我们的方法采用灰箱范式,结合在线的应用无关性能数据(如心跳信号)和硬件性能计数器,确保科学目标达成的同时实现有限性能下降。在多种计算密集型与内存密集型基准测试上评估,并通过Intel的运行平均功耗限制(Running Average Power Limit)在真实系统上控制功耗,结果表明该离线训练的智能体可显著降低能耗,且性能损失在可接受范围内。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Energy efficiency has become an integral aspect of modern computing infrastructure design, impacting the performance, cost, scalability, and durability of production systems. The incorporation of power actuation and sensing capabilities in CPU designs is indicative of this, enabling the deployment of system software that can actively monitor and adjust energy consumption and performance at runtime. While reinforcement learning (RL) would seem ideal for the design of such energy efficiency control systems, online training presents challenges ranging from the lack of proper models for setting up an adequate simulated environment, to perturbation (noise) and reliability issues, if training is deployed on a live system. In this paper we discuss the use of offline reinforcement learning as an alternative approach for the design of an autonomous CPU power controller, with the goal of improving the energy efficiency of parallel applications at runtime without unduly impacting their performance. Offline RL sidesteps the issues incurred by online RL training by leveraging a dataset of state transitions collected from arbitrary policies prior to training. Our methodology applies offline RL to a gray-box approach to energy efficiency, combining online application-agnostic performance data (e.g., heartbeats) and hardware performance counters to ensure that the scientific objectives are met with limited performance degradation. Evaluating our method on a variety of compute-bound and memory-bound benchmarks and controlling power on a live system through Intel's Running Average Power Limit, we demonstrate that such an offline-trained agent can substantially reduce energy consumption at a tolerable performance degradation cost.
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