Emerging GPU architectures offer a cost-effective computing platform by providing thousands of energy-efficient compute cores and high bandwidth memory that facilitate the execution of highly parallel applications. In this paper, we show that different applications, and in fact different kernels from the same application might exhibit significantly varying utilizations of compute and memory resources. In order to improve the energy efficiency of the GPU system, we propose a run-time characterization strategy that classifies kernels as compute- or memory-intensive based on their resource utilizations. Using this knowledge, our proposed mechanism employs core shut-down technique for memory-intensive kernels in order to manage energy in a more efficient way. This strategy uses performance and memory bandwidth utilization information to determine the ideal hardware configuration at run-time. The proposed technique saves on average 21% of total chip energy for memory-intensive applications, which is within 8% of the optimal saving that can be obtained from an oracle scheme.
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