Minimizing Energy on Homogeneous Processors with Shared Memory

Abstract

Energy efficiency is a crucial desideratum in the design of computer systems, from small-sized mobile devices with limited battery to large scale data centers. In such computing systems, processor and memory are considered as two major power consumers among all the system components. One recent trend to reduce power consumption is using shared memory in multi-core systems, such architecture has become ubiquitous nowadays. However, implementing the energy-efficient methods to the multi-core processor and the shared memory separately is not trivial. In this work, we consider the energy-efficient task scheduling problem, which coordinates the power consumption of both the multi-core processor and the shared memory, especially focus on the general situation in which the number of tasks is more than the number of cores. We devise an approximation algorithm with guaranteed performance in the multiple cores system. We tackle the problem by first presenting an optimal algorithm when the assignment of tasks to cores is given. Then we propose an approximation assignment for the general task scheduling.