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，功耗已成为设计更复杂、通用和可靠的系统的关键问题。国际半导体路线图（ITRS）报告估计，到2016年，便携式设备需要消除20倍的动态功耗差距和多达800倍的待机功耗差距。如果不加以控制，功耗将限制未来先进实时嵌入式系统的可行性。这个NSF CAREER研究项目利用当前的操作系统功能来支持实时和功率感知计算，以满足高级实时和嵌入式应用日益严格的时间和功率/能量限制。特别是，这项研究正在开发创新的调度技术和决策功能，可以利用硬件能力并做出适当的权衡。这些技术是基于硬件基础结构特性和应用程序意图的知识，通过操作系统层进行交流。这项研究的预期影响在于它有望缓解当今实时嵌入式应用中电力和能源节约的不足和低效率。这种应用具有很大的经济意义。它们已经很普遍，而且正变得越来越普遍。通过实验和基于应用的研究，该项目旨在验证并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可靠研究。在CAREER项目下，通过课程开发、研究生/本科生指导、外展和成果传播，进行研究和教育的整合。该项目为大学预科生、本科生和研究生，特别是南卡罗来纳大学的大量少数族裔和女性学生提供了动手学习的机会，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.