A Survey and Measurement Study of GPU DVFS on Energy Conservation

Abstract: Energy efficiency has become one of the top design criteria for current computing systems. The dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has been widely adopted by laptop computers, servers, and mobile devices to conserve energy, while the GPU DVFS is still at a certain early age. This paper aims at exploring the impact of GPU DVFS on the application performance and power consumption, and furthermore, on energy conservation. We survey the state-of-the-art GPU DVFS characterizations, and then summarize recent research works on GPU power and performance models. We also conduct real GPU DVFS experiments on NVIDIA Fermi and Maxwell GPUs. According to our experimental results, GPU DVFS has significant potential for energy saving. The effect of scaling core voltage/frequency and memory voltage/frequency depends on not only the GPU architectures, but also the characteristic of GPU applications.