Low Power OS Techniques

Our research in this area involves several different, yet related, goals. One of our current goals is to devise a profile of the energy consumption of a modern computer. With this information, we hope to quantify the effects of many decisions that the operating system makes, with the goal of creating a more power-aware OS. The eventual realization of this work is what we call PARTS (power aware runtime system). Using PARTS and a power-aware operating system, we hope to be able reduce the energy requirements of the machine.

Our current setup consists of a PC containing a data acquisition board, which we use to measure the power consumption of a Power Mac G4 running Linux. We have written software that takes the power consumption information from the DAQ board and sends it via the Internet back to the G4. On the G4, we have modified the Linux scheduler to use this information to determine how to schedule processes based on one of several policies which we provide to the scheduler.

Some pictures of our setup...

For a list of releated references on low power computing, see our references page.