ADACT: PDE-Constrained Thermal Hardware/Software Co-Design Adjoint-Driven Optimal Control via Finite Difference Discretization

Overview & Synopsis

By virtue of the sheer compute demands of large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), modern multi-core microprocessors suffer from severe power density limits and thermal throttling, entailing an urgent need for principled methods for predictive, physics-informed dynamical thermal management (DTM). Here, we introduce a hardware/software co-design physics-informed PDE-constrained DTM throttling optimal control algorithm, ADACT (Adjoint-Driven Adaptive Co-Design Thermal Control), that minimizes thermal risk and cooling energy overhead while maximizing core execution throughput. The underlying physical temperature field is governed by a two-dimensional nonhomogeneous parabolic reaction-diffusion equation with spatially localized, time-varying power source terms and variable convective cooling subject to nonhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. We employ a discretization of the continuous state PDE via a Crank-Nicolson finite difference scheme with a 5-point discrete Laplacian operator on a uniform spatial mesh, which preserves unconditional numerical stability and $O(Δx^2 + Δy^2 + Δt^2)$ second-order temporal and spatial accuracy. To efficiently compute exact gradients, we construct and implement a continuous backward-in-time adjoint state method with L-BFGS as our optimization algorithm of choice. The accuracy and second-order convergence rates of both forward state and backward adjoint solvers are quantitatively verified via the Method of Manufactured Solutions (MMS), and gradient accuracy is validated using directional derivative Taylor tests. Numerical experiments demonstrate that ADACT dynamically throttles software power workloads and modulates hardware cooling efforts to strictly uphold physical thermal thresholds while maintaining operational throughput.