NGS: Collaborative Research: Adaptive Performance and Power Management for Real-Time Systems

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

EIA-0102539 Yann-Hang Lee Arizona State University Adaptive Performance and Power Management for Real-Time Systems This research will enable real-time computer systems to monitor and automatically adapt their power usage to specified fault-tolerance and performance requirements, prevailing workload, and current and projected energy/power constraints. Many systems, which are power-constrained, do not always have a strict limit on their power consumption. Instead, they have periods of time during which energy supply is very limited, and should be used sparingly, while at other times, the power available is adequate and the system is allowed to exploit all its resources to deliver maximum performability. While there has been a great deal of research in developing circuits and design techniques to build low-power devices, there is very little reported on techniques to adjust power consumption on-the-fly to adapt to changing levels of workload and energy/power availability. There is the need for an integrated approach, ranging from the hardware operation (using voltage-clock scaling or a sleep mode) to the application level. Our preliminary investigations have shown that such an integrated approach, exploiting the synergy between these various layers, is far more effective than single-layer approaches adopted incrementally.