Methods and apparatus are provided for eliminating hot spots on processor
chips in a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) computer system. Some
operations, in particular, floating point multiply/add, repetitively
utilize portions of a processor chip to the point that the average power
of the affected portions exceeds cooling capabilities. The localized
temperature of the affected portions can then exceed design limits. The
current invention determines when a hot spot occurs and task swaps the
task to another processor prior to the localized temperature becoming too
hot. Moving of tasks to processors that have data affinity with the
processor reporting a hot spot is considered. Further considerations
include prioritizing unused processors and those processors that have not
recently reported a hot spot.