Energy has become a scarce and expensive resource. This also holds true for many computing environments. Power dissipation is critical in portable devices, such as laptops and mobile phones, in which the capacity of a battery is limited. Furthermore, electricity costs impose a substantial strain on the budget of computing and data centers so that effective power management strategies are required. This seminar will study algorithmic techniques for energy savings. The following three topics will be covered.
- Power-down mechanisms: If a system is idle for a certain time period, it can be transitioned into low-power stand-by or sleep states. The goal is to find state transition schedules minimizing the overall energy consumption.
- Dynamic Speed Scaling: Many modern microprocessors can run at variable speed/frequency. High speed implies high performance but also high energy consumption. The goal is to utilize the full speed/frequency spectrum of a processor and to apply low speed levels whenever possible.
- Networks: The goal is to solve various routing and data transmission problems, typically with the objective to minimize the total transmission energy.
The seminar talks can be presented in German or English, depending on the preference of the students.