Energy-efficient policies for embedded clusters

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Abstract
Power conservation has become a key design issue for many systems, including clusters deployed for embedded systems, where power availability ultimately determines system lifetime. These clusters execute a high rate of requests of highly-variable length, such as in satellite-based multiprocessor systems. The goal of power management in such systems is to minimize the aggregate energy consumption of the whole cluster while ensuring timely responses to requests. In the past, dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) and on/off schemes have been studied under the assumptions of continuously tunable processor frequencies and perfect load-balancing. In this work, we focus on the more realistic case of discrete processor frequencies and propose a new policy that adjusts the number of active nodes based on the system load, not system frequency. We also design a threshold scheme which prevents the system from reacting to short-lived temporary workload changes in the presence of unstable incoming workload. Simulation and implementation results on real hardware show that our policy is very effective in reducing the overall power consumption of clusters executing embedded applications.

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