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Computer using too much power? Give it a REST (Runtime Energy Saving Technology)

  • Special Issue Paper
  • Published:
Computer Science - Research and Development

Abstract

A standard procedure for optimizing both hardware and software in any system is to analyze bottlenecks, reduce them, and make the best possible balance of systems. As the next generation of computing continues to evolve, a new bottleneck has centered on one main resource: energy. Any needlessly spent energy produces heat, increasing loads on cooling systems and raises the hardware temperature, which lowers overall circuit performance. These factors make it clear: like a penny saved, a joule saved is worth not just one joule but hundreds of joules not spent by a bigger power plug.

Simultaneously, all engineering parameters must be measured and weighed in order to keep a clear goal in mind: end users who have greatly invested in programming and development efforts wish to maintain high performance, reduce energy consumption, and do so without significant changes to the original source code. While smaller circuitry increases some energy efficiency, the software level must bridge the gap. The following paper considers a user-friendly solution providing a transparent runtime system.

The Runtime Energy Saving Technology (REST) utilizes Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) to modify frequencies of an architecture’s underlying cores at runtime without prior knowledge. It includes a study on two different Xeon architectures’ energy usage and different frequency predictors. Finally, the paper examines results on HPC-type applications, which show energy consumption reductions by an average of 15.01 % on the SPEC CPU2006 and 10.45 % on the parallel NAS benchmark suites while only degrading performance by 5.95 % and 3.74 %, respectively, compared to the system’s default OnDemand governor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Architecture and Parallel Systems Laboratory, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

    Kelly Livingston

  2. Université de Versailles, Versailles, France

    Nicolas Triquenaux, Thibault Fighiera & William Jalby

  3. Intel Corporation, Versailles, France

    Jean Christophe Beyler

Authors
  1. Kelly Livingston
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  2. Nicolas Triquenaux
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  3. Thibault Fighiera
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  4. Jean Christophe Beyler
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  5. William Jalby
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Correspondence to Kelly Livingston.

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Livingston, K., Triquenaux, N., Fighiera, T. et al. Computer using too much power? Give it a REST (Runtime Energy Saving Technology). Comput Sci Res Dev 29, 123–130 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-012-0226-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-012-0226-0

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