Thermal sensor allocation and placement for reconfigurable systems

Temperature monitoring using thermal sensors is an essential tool for evaluating the thermal behavior and sustaining the reliable operation in high-performance and high-power systems. With current technology scaling and integration trends timely and accurate detection of localized heating will be evermore important. In this work, we address the creation of a resource efficient sensor infrastructure for computing systems that are of regular nature, such as logic array-based computing platforms. We propose algorithms to embed thermal sensors into a regular structure to minimize the number of sensors and determine sensor locations required to maintain a given accuracy in temperature sensing for a given design. Our algorithms are tailored for minimal usage of thermal sensors to suit a variety of architectural conditions. For programmable logic arrays the highly application-specific usage of the hardware resources leads to unpredictable thermal profiles. As a result, post-manufacture instantiation of thermal sensors is desired, which in turn demands the use of native hardware resources, which can be scarce. We demonstrate that using our techniques the number of sensors required to monitor a set of hotspots is reduced by 75% on an average, across different sizes of logic arrays for different hotspot distributions compared to a uniform distribution of sensors throughout the fabrics.