GPGPU Performance Estimation with Core and Memory Frequency Scaling

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) support dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) in order to balance computational performance and energy consumption. However there still lacks simple and accurate performance estimation of a given GPU kernel under different frequency settings on real hardware, which is important to decide best frequency configuration for energy saving. This paper reveals a fine-grained model to estimate the execution time of GPU kernels with both core and memory frequency scaling. Over a 2.5x range of both core and memory frequencies among 12 GPU kernels, our model achieves accurate results (within 3.5%) on real hardware. Compared with the cycle-level simulators, our model only needs some simple micro-benchmark to extract a set of hardware parameters and performance counters of the kernels to produce this high accuracy.