Power and Thermal-aware Scheduling for Real-time Computing Systems: from Theory to Application

We have been enjoying tremendous benefits thanks to the revolutionary advancement of computing systems, driven by the remarkable semiconductor technology scaling and the advanced processor architecture. However, the exponentially increased transistor density has directly led to increased power consumption and elevated system temperature. The power and thermal issues have posed enormous challenges and threaten to slow down the continuous evolvement of computer technology. Effective power/thermal-aware design techniques are urgently demanded at all design abstraction levels. In this book, we present our research efforts to employ real-time scheduling techniques to solve the resource-constrained power/thermal-aware, design-optimization problems. The novelty of this work is that we integrate the cutting-edge research on power and thermal at the circuit and architectural-level into a set of accurate yet simplified system-level models, and are able to conduct system-level analysis and design based on these models. The theoretical study in this work serves as a solid foundation for the guidance of the power/thermal-aware scheduling algorithms development in practical computing systems.