Candidate: Ramy Medhat
Title: Managing Software Resource Tradeoffs to Constrain Power and Energy Consumption
Date: December 6, 2017
Time: 9:30
Place: E5 4106-4128
Supervisor(s): Fischmeister, Sebastian - Bonakdarpour, Borzoo (Computer Science)
Abstract:
Power and energy efficiency have become an increasingly important design metric for a wide spectrum of computing devices. Battery efficiency, which requires a mixture of energy and power efficiency, is exceedingly important especially since there have been no groundbreaking advances in battery capacity recently. There is a large body of work on power and energy efficiency for a wide range of applications and at different levels of abstraction. However, there is a lack of work studying the nuances of different tradeoffs that arise when operating under a power/energy budget. Moreover, there is no work on constructing a generalized model of applications running under power/energy constraints, which allows the designer to optimize their resource consumption, be it power, energy, time, bandwidth, or space.
In this talk, we tackle the problem of managing resource tradeoffs of power/energy constrained applications. We begin by studying the nuances of power/energy tradeoffs with the response time and throughput of stream processing applications. We then study the power performance tradeoff of batch processing applications to identify a power configuration that maximizes performance under a power bound. Next, we study the tradeoff of power/energy with network bandwidth and precision. Finally, we study how to combine tradeoffs into a generalized model of applications running under resource constraints.
To that end, we present detailed studies of the power/energy tradeoff with response time, throughput, performance, network bandwidth, and precision of stream and batch processing applications. We demonstrate how power can be used to reduce bandwidth bottlenecks and extend our offline approach to model bandwidth tradeoffs. Moreover, we present a tool that identifies parts of a program that can be downgraded in precision with minimal impact on accuracy, and maximal impact on energy consumption. Finally, we combine all the above tradeoffs into a flexible model that is efficient to solve and allows for bounding and/or optimizing the consumption of different resources.