KEYWORDS: Multimedia, Operating systems, Video, Computing systems, Algorithm development, Systems modeling, Solid state electronics, Digital photography, Data storage, Manufacturing
Mobile multimedia computers require large amounts of data storage, yet must consume low power in order to
prolong battery life. Solid-state storage offers low power consumption, but its capacity is an order of magnitude
smaller than the hard disks needed for high-resolution photos and digital video. In order to create a device with
the space of a hard drive, yet the low power consumption of solid-state storage, hardware manufacturers have
proposed using flash memory as a write buffer on mobile systems. This paper evaluates the power savings of such
an approach and also considers other possible flash allocation algorithms, using both hardware- and software-level
flash management. Its contributions also include a set of typical multimedia-rich workloads for mobile systems
and power models based upon current disk and flash technology. Based on these workloads, we demonstrate
an average power savings of 267 mW (53% of disk power) using hardware-only approaches. Next, we propose
another algorithm, termed Energy-efficient Virtual Storage using Application-Level Framing (EVS-ALF), which
uses both hardware and software for power management. By collecting information from the applications and
using this metadata to perform intelligent flash allocation and prefetching, EVS-ALF achieves an average power
savings of 307 mW (61%), another 8% improvement over hardware-only techniques.
The computation and communication abilities of modern platforms are enabling increasingly capable cooperative
distributed mobile systems. An example is distributed multimedia processing of sensor data in robots deployed
for search and rescue, where a system manager can exploit the application's cooperative nature to optimize the
distribution of roles and tasks in order to successfully accomplish the mission. Because of limited battery capacities,
a critical task a manager must perform is online energy management. While support for power management
has become common for the components that populate mobile platforms, what is lacking is integration and explicit
coordination across the different management actions performed in a variety of system layers. This papers
develops an integration approach for distributed multimedia applications, where a global manager specifies both
a power operating point and a workload for a node to execute. Surprisingly, when jointly considering power and
QoS, experimental evaluations show that using a simple deadline-driven approach to assigning frequencies can
be non-optimal. These trends are further affected by certain characteristics of underlying power management
mechanisms, which in our research, are identified as groupings that classify component power management as
"compatible" (VFC) or "incompatible" (VFI) with voltage and frequency scaling. We build on these findings
to develop CompatPM, a vertically integrated control strategy for power management in distributed mobile
systems. Experimental evaluations of CompatPM indicate average energy improvements of 8% when platform
resources are managed jointly rather than independently, demonstrating that previous attempts to maximize
battery life by simply minimizing frequency are inappropriate from a platform-level perspective.
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