Power-aware Computing Systems

Summary

Rapidly increasing chip densities and processor speeds have made energy dis- sipation a leading concern in computer design. The problem raised by energy consumption is especially severe for a whole class of computing devices which has recently become almost ubiquitously available-mobile devices like notebooks, PDAs, or mobile phones. On the one hand, these are only equipped with a very limited power supply, so any computation on such a device should be especially careful about resource usage. Even worse, the battery technology for these devices has not kept pace with advances in processor technology and the growing complexity of software. On the other hand, cooling mechanisms become more and more important. Recent trends suggest that processor power consumption doubles every four years-and cooling costs rise exponentially with heat increases. The future processors will require energy management solutions more cost effective than the cooling fans used today.

It has been the goal of the seminar to bring together researchers from the main communities working on reducing power consumption, namely hardware, operating systems, virtual-execution environments, compilers, and applications. The main seminar result, given in Section 3, is a classification of the obstacles, and therefore research directions, with respect to power consumption seen for different classes of devices, ranging from very low power devices, over handheld devices, to servers and work stations. In a next step the seminar identified the impact different levels of dealing with power concerns can have.

The Seminar

The program of the seminar featured presentations of about 35 participating researchers from academia and industry. They were chosen to represent major areas in targeting the energy consumption of a computing system-Applications, Compilers, Virtual-execution Environments, Operating Systems, and Hardware.

In order to identify problem areas and future research areas, discussion groups were formed that resulted in four working groups whose results are presented in this report. In addition, abstracts of the presentations as well as work-in- progress papers are published in these proceedings. Some of the work presented at the seminar will be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Embedded Systems on power, energy, and thermal topics.