Traineeship: High-level Power Simulation for DVS-aware Processors
Description
Over the past years, energy consumption became one of the critical
factors in designing battery-operated mobile embedded systems,
such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) or music
players. As the energy consumption scales quadratically to the
power supply voltage (E ~ V2), Dynamic Voltage Scaling
(DVS) proved to be an effective solution for saving energy,
recently receiving a lot of attention. The method is based on
dynamic changing of the supply voltage to the lowest possible
extent that ensures proper operation, when the required
performance is lower than the maximum performance. Several
commercial microprocessors (XSCALE,Crusoe) that incorporate
DVS support were introduced in the last 4 years.
To verify the correctness of a designed system, a simulation is
required. In this project, a tool that estimates the energy
consumption of an application on a DVS aware processor is
developed. The development will consists in two phases:
- Modifying the XTREM power simulator XTREM to
produce traces that contain energy information.
- Developing a tool that estimates the energy
consumption for a trace, considering a given algorithm for selecting
the voltage level.
The scientific part of this project is to develop a voltage
scaling algorithm for streaming application. These kind of
applications have real-time constraints and consist in a loop
which iterates over each input frame. The performance requirements
are at frame level (e.g. to display a frame at every 1/25
seconds). The algorithm, has to select the next voltage level,
based on:
- Remaining estimated worst case execution time (WCET).
- Remaining time for producing the frame.
- Most probable required time.
In order to check the efficiency of this algorithm, its results
will be compared with few state-of-the-art voltage scaling
algorithms.
Duration
April 2005 - July 2005
Student
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