System-level power optimization

Abstract

This tutorial surveys design methods for energy-efficient system-level design. We consider electronic systems consisting of a hardware platform and software layers. We consider the three major constituents of hardware that consume energy, namely computation, communication, and storage units, and we review methods for reducing their energy consumption. We also study models for analyzing the energy cost of software, and methods for energy-efficient software design and compilation.This survey is organized around three main phases of a system design: conceptualization and modeling, design and implementation, and runtime management. For each phase, we review recent techniques for energy-efficient design of both hardware and software.

Parallel and Distributed Optimization of Dynamic Data Structures for Multimedia Embedded Systems

“…In the case of static memory, Benini et al [4] and Panda et al [24] presented in the last decade two thorough surveys on static data and memory optimization techniques for embedded systems. More recently, in [6], [10] and [7], authors achieve to reduce the memory subsystems requirements by 50% using a linear time algorithm by exploring a coordinated data and computation reordering for array-based data structures in multimedia applications.…”

Automatic Run-Time Selection of Power Policies for Operating Systems

“…Power management is also important in high-performance servers because performance improvements are limited by the excessive heat in the system [11]. Finding better policies has been the main focus of OSPM research in recent years [3]. A policy is an algorithm that chooses when to change a component's power states and which power states to use.…”

Dynamic power management using data buffers

“…Energy management [1,2] dynamically changes a component's power state based on the run-time requirements. Energy management detects the periods when a component is idle or under-utilized.…”

“…Because changing a component's state has overhead -additional energy and delay -energy management is beneficial only if the saved energy can compensate the overhead. Several surveys are available about different techniques in energy management [1,2,13].…”

“…The component is turned off (sometimes called shut down) or scaled down the performance to reduce energy consumption during the periods. This is called energy management or dynamic power management [1,2]. Some methods use scheduling to explicitly create idle or under-utilized periods [10,12,14].…”