Managing Energy as a First Class Operating System Resource

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

Managing the energy consumption of computers requires cooperation between energy aware applications and operating systems. This research seeks to fully explore the energy management space surrounding the interaction of applications and the operating system. Applications should adjust their energy consumption when appropriate, but must be provided accurate information on their individual energy consumption. The operating system must implement the mechanisms and policies to determine energy consumption and allocate it fairly as a global system resource. This research will first re-examine operating system structure with an emphasis on managing energy as a first class resource. Energy management cuts across all traditional system resources, with the CPU, disk, network, and memory all exhibiting unique energy consumption characteristics. Next, the work will explore policies for allocating energy to competing tasks. The goal is to maintain fairness while observing user-specified priorities and soft real-time deadlines. The end product of this research will be a comprehensive framework for globally managing energy in a diverse set of scenarios, ranging from a single mobile computer, to wireless sensor networks that may have aggregate goals across a large number of sensors, to hosting centers that wish to provide maximum performance with minimum energy consumption.