Electrical & Computer Engineering Research Works
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1658
Browse
4 results
Search Results
Item Power Minimization under QoS Constraints(IEEE, 2002-04) Wong, Jennifer L.; Qu, Gang; Potkonjak, MiodragQoS has been often addressed in multimedia, video, and networking research communities, but rarely in the design community. Our goal is to introduce the first system design technique for comprehensive quality-of-service (QoS) low power synthesis. Specifically, we study how to efficiently exploit the trade-o between the system cost and energy consumption in real-time systems that address packet-based multimedia transmission and processing. We first introduce a system of techniques that minimizes energy consumption of stream-oriented applications under two main QoS metrics: latency and synchronization. Speci cally, we study how multiple voltages can be used to simultaneously satisfy hardware requirements and minimize power consumption, while preserving the requested level of QoS, in this case satisfying latency and synchronization requirements. We have developed a provably optimal polynomial time o -line algorithm for multiple volt- age scheduling of single and multiple processes. The o -line algorithm provides lower bounds on achievable power minimization and can be used as a starting point for the development and evaluation of an on-line approach. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated on a number of multimedia benchmarks.Item Energy Minimization of System Pipelines Using Multiple Voltages(IEEE, 1999-05) Qu, Gang; Kirovski, Darko; Potkonjak, Miodrag; Srivastava, Mani B.Modem computer and communication system design has to consider the timing constraints imposed by communication and system pipelines, and minimize the energy consumption. We adopt the recent proposed model for communication pipeline latency[23] and address the problem of how to minimize the power consumption in system-level pipelines under the latency constraints by selecting supply voltage for each pipeline stage using the variable voltage core-based system design methodology[l 11. We define the problem, solve it optimally under realistic assumptions and develop algorithms for power minimization of system pipeline designs based on our theoretical results. We apply this new approach on the 4- stage Myrinet GAM pipeline, with the appropriate voltage profiles, we achieve 93.4%, 91.3% and 26.9% power reduction on three pipeline stages over the traditional design.Item Techniques for Energy-Efficient Communication Pipeline Design(IEEE, 2002-10) Qu, Gang; Potkonjak, MiodragThe performance of many modern computer and communication systems is dictated by the latency of communication pipelines. At the same time, power/energy consumption is often another limiting factor in many portable systems. We address the problem of how to minimize the power consumption in system-level pipelines under latency constraints. In particular, we apply fragmentation technique to achieve parallelism and exploit advantages provided by variable voltage design methodology to optimally select voltage and, therefore, speed of each pipeline stage.We focus our study on the practical case when each pipeline stage operates at a fixed speed. Unlike the conventional pipeline system, where all stages run at the same speed, our system may have different stages running at different speeds to conserve energy while providing guaranteed latency. For a given latency requirement, we find explicit solutions for the most energy efficient fragmentation and voltage setting. We further study a less practical case when each stage can dynamically change its speed to get further energy saving. We define the problem and transform it to a nonlinear system whose solution provides a lower bound for energy consumption. We apply the obtained theoretical results to develop algorithms for power/energy minimization of computer and communication systems. The experimental result suggests that significant power/energy reduction, is possible without additional latency. In fact, we achieve almost 40% total energy saving over the combined minimal supply voltage selection and system shut-down technique and 85% if none of these two energy minimization methods is used.Item Concurrency, Latency, or System Overhead: Which Has the Largest Impact on Uniprocessor DRAM-System Performance?(2001-06) Cuppu, Vinodh; Jacob, BruceGiven a fixed CPU architecture and a fixed DRAM timing specification, there is still a large design space for a DRAM system organization. Parameters include the number of memory channels, the bandwidth of each channel, burst sizes, queue sizes and organizations, turnaround overhead, memory-controller page protocol, algorithms for assigning request priorities and scheduling requests dynamically, etc. In this design space, we see a wide variation in application execution times; for example, execution times for SPEC CPU 2000 integer suite on a 2-way ganged Direct Rambus organization (32 data bits) with 64-byte bursts are 10–20% lower than execution times on an otherwise identical configuration that uses 32-byte bursts. This represents two system configurations that are relatively close to each other in the design space; performance differences become even more pronounced for designs further apart. This paper characterizes the sources of overhead in high-performance DRAM systems and investigates the most effective ways to reduce a system’s exposure to performance loss. In particular, we look at mechanisms to increase a system’s support for concurrent transactions, mechanisms to reduce request latency, and mechanisms to reduce the “system overhead”—the portion of the primary memory system’s overhead that is not due to DRAM latency but rather to things like turnaround time, request queueing, inefficiencies due to read/write request interleaving, etc. Our simulator models a 2GHz, highly aggressive out-of-order uniprocessor. The interface to the memory system is fully non-blocking, supporting up to 32 outstanding misses at both the level-1 and level-2 caches and split-transaction busses to all DRAM banks.