Estimating the power and thermal characteristics of a processor is essential for designing its power delivery system, packaging, cooling, and power/thermal management schemes. Power models that estimate the power consumption of each functional unit/hardware component from first principles are slow and tedious to build. Machine learning can be used to create power models that are fast and reasonably accurate. Machine learning can also be used to calibrate analytical models that estimate power. In this talk, I’ll present some examples of performance and power modeling using machine learning.
One application for machine learning has been to create max power stressmarks. Manually developing and tuning so called stressmarks is extremely tedious and time-consuming while requiring an intimate understanding of the processor.  In our past research, we created a framework that uses machine learning for the automated generation of stressmarks. In this talk, the methodology of the creation of automatic stressmarks will be explained. Experiments on multiple platforms validating the proposed approach will be described.
Yet another application for machine learning is in cross-platform performance and power prediction. If one model is slow to run real-world benchmarks/workloads, is it possible to predict/estimate the performance/power by using runs on another platform? Are there correlations that can be exploited using machine learning to make cross-platform performance and power predictions? A methodology to perform cross-platform performance/power predictions will be presented in this talk.

Lizy Kurian John is B. N. Gafford Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin. She received her Ph. D in Computer Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include workload characterization, performance evaluation, architectures with emerging memory technologies such as die-stacked DRAM, and high performance processor architectures for emerging workloads. She is recipient of NSF CAREER award, UT Austin Engineering Foundation Faculty Award,  Halliburton, Brown and Root Engineering Foundation Young Faculty Award  2001, University of Texas Alumni Association (Texas Exes) Teaching Award 2004, The Pennsylvania State University Outstanding Engineering Alumnus 2011, etc.  She has coauthored a book on Digital Systems Design using VHDL (Cengage Publishers, 2007, 2016),  a book on Digital Systems Design using Verilog (Cengage Publishers, 2014)  and has edited 4 books including a book on Computer Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking.  She holds 10 US patents and is a Fellow of IEEE.