CAREER: Power Aware Scheduling for Real-Time Embedded Systems

随着集成电路技术的进步和系统的复杂性，功耗急剧增加，已成为设计更复杂、多功能和可靠系统的关键问题。国际半导体路线图（ITRS）报告估计，到2016年，便携式设备的20倍动态功耗差距和高达800倍的待机功耗差距需要缩小。如果不加以控制，功耗将降低未来先进实时嵌入式系统的可行性。这个NSF CAREER研究项目正在利用当前的操作系统功能来支持实时和功耗感知计算，以满足高级实时和嵌入式应用日益严格的时序和功耗/能源限制。 特别是，这项研究正在开发创新的调度技术和决策功能，可以利用硬件功能，并作出适当的权衡。 这些技术是基于硬件基础设施功能和应用程序的意图的知识，通过操作系统层进行通信。这项研究的预期影响在于它的承诺，以减轻当今的实时嵌入式应用中的功率和能源节约的不足和效率低下。 这些应用具有重要的经济意义。 它们已经普遍存在，而且正在变得越来越普遍。通过实验，基于应用的研究，该项目旨在验证和提供在汽车电子等实际场景下的理论系统级功耗降低技术的合理研究。研究和教育的整合是通过课程开发，研究生/本科生辅导，外展和传播结果在这个职业项目下进行的。该项目为大学预科生、本科生和研究生，特别是南卡罗来纳州大学的大量少数民族学生和女学生提供实践学习机会，以确保他们为当今竞争激烈的就业市场做好准备。

Power consumption, which has increased dramatically with IC technology advancement and system complexity, has become a critical issue in design of more complicated, versatile, and reliable systems. The International Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) report estimates that a 20-times dynamic power consumption gap and as much as 800-times standby power consumption gap for portable devices need to be closed by the year 2016. Left unchecked, power consumption will curtail the feasibility of future advanced real-time embedded systems. This NSF CAREER research project is leveraging current operating system functionality to support real-time and power-aware computation that can meet the increasingly stringent timing and power/energy constraints for advanced real-time and embedded applications. In particular, this research is developing innovative scheduling techniques and decision functions that can exploit hardware capabilities and make proper tradeoffs. These techniques are based on knowledge of hardware infrastructure features and the intentions of applications, as communicated through the operating system layer. The expected impact of this research lies in its promise to alleviate the inadequacy and inefficiency of power and energy conservation in todays real-time embedded applications. Such applications are of great economic importance. They already prevalent and are becoming increasingly pervasive. Through experimental, application-based research, this project seeks to validate and provide sound studies of its theoretical system-level power reduction techniques under practical scenarios such as automotive electronics. Integration of research and education is carried out under this CAREER project via the course development, graduate/undergraduate student mentoring, out-reach, and dissemination of results. The project offers hands-on learning opportunities for pre-college, undergraduate, and graduate students, especially for the large number of minority and women students at the University of South Carolina, to ensure their preparedness for todays highly competitive job market.