Very Simple Thermal Simulation Of Tiled Multi-Core System

Let's assume a tiled multi-core architecture, eg. a two dimensional grid of nxm compute tiles. There might be several tasks running on every tile, which results in an increase of temperature of the corresponding tiles. Idle tiles will otherwise cool down.

The following video shows the result of a very simple thermal simulation with a 2x2 grid and a single task. The toy "thermal management" migrates the task if the average temperature of a tile exceeds a threshold temperature and migrates the task to the tile with the minimum average temperature.

The video was created using this script (Python+Numpy+Matplotlib+ffmpeg). A toy model for temperature conduction is being used. Albeit the temperature model not being physically accurate, the simulation might still be useful to quickly evaluate more sophisticated thermal management strategies.