Energy consumption is already recognized as the crucial factor that will limit the performance of future microprocessors, leading to the design and adoption of heterogeneous architectures and dark silicon. At end of the spectrum, mobile computing devices need to be equipped with low-power hardware components to maximize their battery life. This constraint, particularly from the embedded and mobile market segments, is forcing hardware manufacturers to improve their designs for better energy efficiency. Apart from mobile devices and embedded systems, reducing energy consumption in today's desktop computers is also crucial so as to minimize power bills. High Performance Computing (HPC) is another area where power consumption is one of the main bottlenecks in order to achieve performance constraints required by scientific applications. Processor, memory and hard disks nowadays feature low-power modes to trade-off performance for power by applying energy-friendly techniques such as dynamical voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) or the idle states, in order to promote idle cores to low-consuming states. However, these mechanisms have to be used carefully, though, as the application runtime increase may outweigh the power decrease such that the total energy is increased.
In this sense, much of the progress towards increasing energy-awareness in today’s hardware has already been done, but demands for a tight interaction with the system software (i.e., the operating system). Thus, it is clear that much remains to be done in the software side in order to leverage the power-saving mechanisms that the hardware provides. In general, a holistic approach in order to expose energy considerations to higher-level software is needed to enable a whole new set of energy optimizations.
The main goal this seminar is to find out the best practices, programming techniques and guidelines for increasing energy-awareness while preserving the performance of applications running on today's architectures. This seminar will be given in English.
Die Themenvergabe und die Terminabsprache erfolgt in einem Vorbesprechungstermin und über die Veranstaltungsmailingliste.
Beachten Sie auch unsere allgemeinen organisatorischen Hinweise zu Seminaren.
Das Seminar eignet sich für Studierende der Informatik in den Diplom- und Bachelorstudiengängen. Studierende anderer Studiengänge müssen die Anrechnung mit dem jeweiligen Prüfungsausschuss klären.
Interessierte Zuhörer sind auch herzlich willkommen.
You are advised to have face to face meetings with your supervisor in the beginning/meantime if you need help or solve questions. To do so, arrange in advance an appointment with your corresponding supervisor.