Energy Efficient Computing

January 8, 2010
Tajana Simunic Rosing | University of California, San Diego

In this talk I give an overview of the algorithms we have developed at UCSD to significantly lower the energy consumption in computing systems. We derived optimal power management strategies for stationary workloads that have been implemented both in HW and SW. Run-time adaptation can be done via an online learning algorithm that selects among a set of policies. We generalize the algorithm to include thermal management since we found that minimizing the power consumption does not necessarily reduce the overall energy costs. To reduce the performance costs typically associated with state of the art thermal management techniques, we developed a new set of proactive management policies. The experimental results using real datacenter workloads on an actual multicore system show that our proactive technique is able to dramatically reduce the adverse effects of temperature by over 60%. Most recently we have shown that symbiotic scheduling of workloads in virtualized environments can lead to average 15% energy savings with 20% performance benefit in high utilization scenarios.

I will also present some of the recent work we had done to address the energy savings in battery powered and energy harvesting systems. We are designing a new kind of “citizen infrastructure”, CitiSense, as an end-to-end health and environmental information system with near real-time data streams and feedback loops from the system to the sensing, processing, and actuation infrastructure. We have developed adaptive algorithms to tradeoff accuracy of computation versus the available energy for such systems, while taking into account the energy harvesting capabilities.

Speaker Details

Tajana Šimunic Rosing is currently an Assistant Professor in Computer Science Department at UCSD, a director of System Energy Efficiency Lab at UCSD and a head of the Energy efficient datacenter thrust as a part of the MuSyC center. Her research interests are energy efficient computing, embedded and wireless systems. Since starting her position at UCSD four years ago, she has been involved in a number of different projects as a PI, co-PI or senior personnel totaling approximately $50M. She has published more than 70 papers and has filed 8 patents to date. Prior to this she was a full time researcher at HP Labs while working part-time at Stanford University. She finished her PhD at Stanford University, concurrently with completing her Masters in Engineering Management. Her PhD topic was Dynamic Management of Power Consumption. Prior to pursuing the PhD, she worked as a Senior Design Engineer at Altera Corporation. She has served at a number of Technical Paper Committees, and is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. In the past she has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems.