Exploiting Energy-Aware Programming to Build Energy-Efficient System Software

Опубликовано 22 июня 2016, 20:11

Optimization of application and system software for energy efficiency is of ecological, economical, and technical importance—and still challenging. Deficiency in adequate tooling support is a major issue. The few tools available (i.e., measurement instruments, energy profilers) have poorly conceived interfaces and their integration into widely-used development processes is missing. This implies time-consuming, tedious measurements and profiling runs and aggravates, if not shoots down, the development of energy-efficient software. The proactive energy-aware development kit (PEEK) is a systems approach to optimize software for energy efficiency. PEEK fully automates energy measurement tasks and suggests program-code improvements at development time by providing automatically generated energy optimization hints. Our approach is based on a combined software and hardware infrastructure to automatically determine energy demand of program code and pinpoint energy faults, thereby integrating seamlessly into existing software development environments. As part of PEEK we have designed a lightweight, yet powerful electronic measuring device capable of taking automated, analog energy measurements. The talk presents our research work on PEEK, discusses today's best practices in energy-optimization of software, and shows how software developers benefit from our integrated approach to energy-aware programming.