Execution context optimization for disk energy

ABSTRACT

Power, energy, and thermal concerns have constrained embedded systems designs. Computing capability and storage density have increased dramatically, enabling the emergence of handheld devices from special to general purpose computing. In many mobile systems, the disk is among the top energy consumers. Many previous optimizations for disk energy have assumed uniprogramming environments. However, many optimizations degrade in multiprogramming because programs are unaware of other programs (execution context). We introduce a framework to make programs aware of and adapt to their runtime execution context.

We evaluated real workloads by collecting user activity traces and characterizing the execution contexts. The study confirms that many users run a limited number of programs concurrently. We applied execution context optimizations to eight programs and tested ten combinations. The programs ran concurrently while the disk's power was measured. Our measurement infrastructure allows interactive sessions to be scripted, recorded, and replayed to compare the optimizations' effects against the baseline. Our experiments covered two write cache policies. For write-through, energy savings was in the range 3-63% with an average of 21%. For write-back, energy savings was in the range -33-61% with an average of 8%. In all cases, our optimizations incurred less than 1% performance penalty.

REFERENCES

• 1: Nevine AbouGhazaleh , Daniel Mossé , Bruce Childers , Rami Melhem , Matthew Craven, Collaborative Operating System and Compiler Power Management for Real-Time Applications, Proceedings of the The 9th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, p.133, May 27-30, 2003
• 2: N. Abramson. The ALOHA system - another alternative for computer communications. In Proceedings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference, pages 281--285, 1970.
• 3: Adobe. PDF Reference. Adobe Systems Incorporated, sixth edition, Oct. 2007.
• 4: Apple Incorporated. iPhone. http:// www.apple.com / iphone.
• 5: Apple Incorporated. iPod. http:// www.apple.com / ipodclassic.
• 6: Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau , David E. Culler , Alan M. Mainwaring, Scheduling with implicit information in distributed systems, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMETRICS joint international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, p.233-243, June 22-26, 1998, Madison, Wisconsin, United States
• 7: R. Card, T. Ts'o, and S. Tweedie. Design and implementation of the second extended filesystem. In Proceedings of the Dutch International Symposium on Linux, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Dec. 1994.
• 8: Mark E. Crovella , Azer Bestavros, Self-similarity in World Wide Web traffic: evidence and possible causes, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.5 n.6, p.835-846, Dec. 1997 [doi>10.1109/90.650143]
• 9: Charles Crowley, TkReplay: record and replay for Tk, Proceedings of the 3rd Annual USENIX Workshop on Tcl/Tk, p.14-14, July 06-08, 1995, Toronto, Canada
• 10: V. Delaluz , M. Kandemir , N. Vijaykrishnan , M. J. Irwin , A. Sivasubramaniam , I. Kolcu, Compiler-Directed Array Interleaving for Reducing Energy in Multi-Bank Memories, Proceedings of the 2002 conference on Asia South Pacific design automation/VLSI Design, p.288, January 07-11, 2002
• 11: M. Desnoyers and M. Dagenais. The LTTng tracer: A low impact performance and behavior monitor for GNU/Linux. In Proceedings of the Ottawa Linux Symposium, volume 1, pages 209--223, Ottawa, Canada, July 2006.
• 12: Fred Douglis , P. Krishnan , Brian N. Bershad, Adaptive Disk Spin-down Policies for Mobile Computers, Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Mobile and Location-Independent Computing, p.121-137, April 10-11, 1995
• 13: K. Drake. XTEST Extension Protocol. X Consortium Standard, 1994. Version 2.2.
• 14: Steven D. Gribble , Gurmeet Singh Manku , Drew Roselli , Eric A. Brewer , Timothy J. Gibson , Ethan L. Miller, Self-similarity in file systems, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMETRICS joint international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, p.141-150, June 22-26, 1998, Madison, Wisconsin, United States
• 15: Selim Gurun , Chandra Krintz, AutoDVS: an automatic, general-purpose, dynamic clock scheduling system for hand-held devices, Proceedings of the 5th ACM international conference on Embedded software, September 18-22, 2005, Jersey City, NJ, USA [doi>10.1145/1086228.1086270]
• 16: T. Heath, E. Pinheiro, J. Hom, U. Kremer, and R. Bianchini. Code transformations for energy-efficient device management. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 53(8):974--987, Aug. 2004.
• 17: J. Hom and U. Kremer. Inter-program compilation for disk energy reduction. In B. Falsafi and T. Vijaykumar, editors, Power-Aware Computer Systems, volume 3164 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 13--25. Springer, 2004.
• 18: Jerry Hom , Ulrich Kremer, Inter-program optimizations for conserving disk energy, Proceedings of the 2005 international symposium on Low power electronics and design, August 08-10, 2005, San Diego, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/1077603.1077684]
• 19: Chris Lattner , Vikram Adve, LLVM: A Compilation Framework for Lifelong Program Analysis & Transformation, Proceedings of the international symposium on Code generation and optimization: feedback-directed and runtime optimization, p.75, March 20-24, 2004, Palo Alto, California
• 20: Will E. Leland , Murad S. Taqqu , Walter Willinger , Daniel V. Wilson, On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic, Conference proceedings on Communications architectures, protocols and applications, p.183-193, September 13-17, 1993, San Francisco, California, United States
• 21: Open Handset Alliance. Android. http:// www.openhandsetalliance.com.
• 22: Openmoko Incorporated. Openmoko. http:// openmoko.org.
• 23: J. Ousterhout. Scheduling techniques for concurrent systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Miami, FL, Oct. 1982.
• 24: Athanasios E. Papathanasiou , Michael L. Scott, Energy efficient prefetching and caching, Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference, p.22-22, June 27-July 02, 2004, Boston, MA
• 25: Lawrence G. Roberts, ALOHA packet system with and without slots and capture, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.5 n.2, p.28-42, April 1975 [doi>10.1145/1024916.1024920]
• 26: Drew Roselli , Jacob R. Lorch , Thomas E. Anderson, A comparison of file system workloads, Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference, p.4-4, June 18-23, 2000, San Diego, California
• 27: Henrik Sandklef, Testing applications with Xnee, Linux Journal, v.2004 n.117, p.5, January 2004
• 28: Andreas Weissel , Björn Beutel , Frank Bellosa, Cooperative I/O: a novel I/O semantics for energy-aware applications, Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation

  Due to copyright restrictions we are not able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading

  , December 09-11, 2002, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/1060289.1060301]
• 29: Qingbo Zhu , Francis M. David , Christo F. Devaraj , Zhenmin Li , Yuanyuan Zhou , Pei Cao, Reducing Energy Consumption of Disk Storage Using Power-Aware Cache Management, Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, p.118, February 14-18, 2004 [doi>10.1109/HPCA.2004.10022]
• 30: M. Zimet. Record extension library specification: Version 1.10 public review draft. The X Resource, 14(1):177--193, Feb. 1995.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features
          Subjects: Frameworks

General Terms:
Experimentation, Languages, Measurement

Keywords:
multiprogramming, runtime adaptation, synchronization, user study