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，已经成为设计更复杂、更多功能和更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，便携式设备的20倍动态功耗缺口和高达800倍的待机功耗缺口需要弥合。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。该NSF职业研究项目正在利用当前的操作系统功能来支持实时和节能计算，这些计算可以满足高级实时和嵌入式应用程序日益严格的时间和功率/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，可以利用硬件能力并进行适当的权衡。这些技术基于硬件基础设施功能的知识和通过操作系统层传达的应用程序的意图。这项研究的预期影响在于它承诺缓解当今实时嵌入式应用在功耗和节能方面的不足和低效。这种应用具有重要的经济意义。它们已经很普遍了，而且正在变得越来越普遍。通过基于应用的实验研究，该项目寻求在汽车电子等实际场景中验证和提供其理论系统级节能技术的可靠研究。在这一职业项目下，通过课程开发、研究生/本科生指导、外展和成果传播，将研究和教育结合起来。该项目为大学预科、本科生和研究生提供实践学习机会，特别是为南卡罗来纳大学的大量少数族裔和女性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.