Power-efficient System Design

The Information and communication technology (ICT) industry is said to account for 2% of the worldwide carbon emissions – a fraction that continues to grow with the relentless push for more and more sophisticated computing equipment, c- munications infrastructure, and mobile devices. While computers evolved in the directionofhigherandhigherperformanceformostofthelatterhalfofthe20thc- tury, the late 1990’s and early 2000’ssaw a new emergingfundamentalconcern that has begun to shape our day-to-day thinking in system design – power dissipation. As we elaborate in Chapter 1, a variety of factors colluded to raise power-ef?ciency as a ?rst class design concern in the designer’s mind, with profound consequences all over the ?eld: semiconductor process design, circuit design, design automation tools, system and application software, all the way to large data centers. Power-ef?cient System Design originated from a desire to capture and highlight the exciting developments in the rapidly evolving ?eld of power and energy op- mization in electronic and computer based systems. Tremendous progress has been made in the last two decades, and the topic continues to be a fascinating research area. To develop a clearer focus, we have concentrated on the relatively higher level of design abstraction that is loosely called the system level. In addition to the ext- sive coverage of traditional power reduction targets such as CPU and memory, the book is distinguished by detailed coverage of relatively modern power optimization ideas focussing on components such as compilers, operating systems, servers, data centers, and graphics processors.

Power-efficient System Design Preeti Ranjan Panda Aviral Shrivastava B. V. N. Silpa Krishnaiah Gummidipudi This book addresses power optimization in modern electronic and computer systems. Several forces aligned in the past decade to drive contemporary computing in the direction of low power and energy-awareness: the mobile revolution took the world by storm; power budgets forced mainstream processor designers to abandon the quest for higher clock frequency; and large data centers with overwhelming power costs began to play vital roles in our daily lives. Power optimization was elevated to a first class design concern, forcing everyone from the process engineer, circuit designer, processor architect, software developer, system builder, and even data center maintainer to make conscious efforts to reduce power consumption using myriad techniques and tools. This book explores power optimization opportunities and their exploitation at various levels of abstraction. Fundamental power optimizations are covered at each level of abstraction and applied to components such as compilers, operating systems, servers, data centers, and graphics processors. This book covers a comprehensive range of disparate power optimizations and is designed to be accessible to students, researchers, and practitioners alike. • Low power digital design • Low power processor architecture • Power efficient memory and cache design • Power aware operating systems, compilers, and applications • Power issues in large servers and data centers • Low power graphics processors