[ACM Press the international conference - San Jose, California, USA (2003.10.30-2003.11.01)] Proceedings of the international conference on Compilers, architectures and synthesis for embedded systems - CASES '03 - A control-theoretic approach to dynamic voltage scheduling

✍ Scribed by Varma, Ankush; Ganesh, Brinda; Sen, Mainak; Choudhury, Suchismita Roy; Srinivasan, Lakshmi; Bruce, Jacob

• Book ID: 124098132
• Publisher: ACM Press
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 219 KB
• Category: Article
• ISBN-13: 9781581136760
• DOI: 10.1145/951710.951744

✦ Synopsis

The development of energy-conscious embedded and/or mobile systems exposes a trade-off between energy consumption and system performance. Recent microprocessors have incorporated dynamic voltage scaling as a tool that system software can use to explore this trade-off. Developing appropriate heuristics to control this feature is a non-trivial venture; as has been shown in the past, voltage-scaling heuristics that closely track perceived performance requirements do not save much energy, while those that save the most energy tend to do so at the expense of performance-resulting in poor response time, for example. We note that the task of dynamically scaling processor speed and voltage to meet changing performance requirements resembles a classical control-systems problem, and so we apply a bit of control theory to the task in order to define a new voltage-scaling algorithm. We find that, using our nqPID (not quite PID) algorithm, one can improve upon the current best-of-class heuristic-Pering's AVG N algorithm, based on Govil's AGED_AVERAGES algorithm and Weiser's PAST algorithm-in both energy consumption and performance. The study is executionbased, not trace-based; the voltage-scaling heuristics were integrated into an embedded operating system running on a Motorola M-CORE processor model. The applications studied are all members of the MediaBench benchmark suite.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.3[Special-purpose and Application-based systems]Real-time and Embedded Systems.