Energy Saving and Scavenging in Stand-alone and Large Scale Distributed Systems.

This thesis focuses on energy management techniques for distributed systems such as hand-held mobile devices, sensor nodes, and data center servers. One of the major design problems in multiple application domains is the mismatch between workloads and resources. Sub-optimal assignment of workloads to resources can cause underloaded or overloaded resources, resulting in performance degradation or energy waste. This work specifically focuses on the heterogeneity in system hardware components and workloads. It includes energy management solutions for unregulated or batteryless embedded systems; and data center servers with heterogeneous workloads, machines, and processor wear states. This thesis describes four major contributions: (1) This thesis describes a battery test and energy delivery system design process to maintain battery life in embedded systems without voltage regulators. (2) In battery-less sensor nodes, this thesis demonstrates a routing protocol to maintain reliable transmission through the sensor network. (3) This thesis has characterized typical workloads and developed two models to capture the heterogeneity of data center tasks and machines: a task performance model and a machine resource utilization model. These models allow users to predict task finish time on individual machines. It then integrates these two models into a task scheduler based on the Hadoop framework for MapReduce tasks, and uses this scheduler for server energy minimization using task concentration. (4) In addition to saving server energy consumption, this thesis describes a method of reducing data center cooling energy by maintaining optimal server processor temperature setpoints through a task assignment algorithm. This algorithm considers the reliability impact of processor wear states. It records processor wear states through automatic timing slack tests on a cluster of machines with varying core temperatures, voltages, and frequencies. These optimal temperature setpoints are used in a task scheduling algorithm that saves both server and cooling energy.PhDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116746/1/xjhe_1.pd

An Intelligent Framework for Energy-Aware Mobile Computing Subject to Stochastic System Dynamics

abstract: User satisfaction is pivotal to the success of mobile applications. At the same time, it is imperative to maximize the energy efficiency of the mobile device to ensure optimal usage of the limited energy source available to mobile devices while maintaining the necessary levels of user satisfaction. However, this is complicated due to user interactions, numerous shared resources, and network conditions that produce substantial uncertainty to the mobile device's performance and power characteristics. In this dissertation, a new approach is presented to characterize and control mobile devices that accurately models these uncertainties. The proposed modeling framework is a completely data-driven approach to predicting power and performance. The approach makes no assumptions on the distributions of the underlying sources of uncertainty and is capable of predicting power and performance with over 93% accuracy. Using this data-driven prediction framework, a closed-loop solution to the DEM problem is derived to maximize the energy efficiency of the mobile device subject to various thermal, reliability and deadline constraints. The design of the controller imposes minimal operational overhead and is able to tune the performance and power prediction models to changing system conditions. The proposed controller is implemented on a real mobile platform, the Google Pixel smartphone, and demonstrates a 19% improvement in energy efficiency over the standard frequency governor implemented on all Android devices.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Engineering 201

Deployment and management of SDR cloud computing resources: problem definition and fundamental limits

Software-defined radio (SDR) describes radio transceivers implemented in software that executes on general-purpose hardware. SDR combined with cloud computing technology will reshape the wireless access infrastructure, enabling computing resource sharing and centralized digital-signal processing (DSP). SDR clouds have different constraints than general-purpose grids or clouds: real-time response to user session requests and real-time execution of the corresponding DSP chains. This article addresses the SDR cloud computing resource management problem. We show that the maximum traffic load that a single resource allocator (RA) can handle is limited. It is a function of the RA complexity and the call setup delay and user blocking probability constraints. We derive the RA capacity analytically and provide numerical examples. The analysis demonstrates the fundamental tradeoffs between short call setup delays (few processors) and low blocking probability (many processors). The simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of a distributed resource management and the necessity of adapting the processor assignment to RAs according to the given traffic load distribution. These results provide new insights and guidelines for designing data centers and distributed resource management methods for SDR clouds.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Scheduling and Tuning Kernels for High-performance on Heterogeneous Processor Systems

Accelerated parallel computing techniques using devices such as GPUs and Xeon Phis (along with CPUs) have proposed promising solutions of extending the cutting edge of high-performance computer systems. A significant performance improvement can be achieved when suitable workloads are handled by the accelerator. Traditional CPUs can handle those workloads not well suited for accelerators. Combination of multiple types of processors in a single computer system is referred to as a heterogeneous system. This dissertation addresses tuning and scheduling issues in heterogeneous systems. The first section presents work on tuning scientific workloads on three different types of processors: multi-core CPU, Xeon Phi massively parallel processor, and NVIDIA GPU; common tuning methods and platform-specific tuning techniques are presented. Then, analysis is done to demonstrate the performance characteristics of the heterogeneous system on different input data. This section of the dissertation is part of the GeauxDock project, which prototyped a few state-of-art bioinformatics algorithms, and delivered a fast molecular docking program. The second section of this work studies the performance model of the GeauxDock computing kernel. Specifically, the work presents an extraction of features from the input data set and the target systems, and then uses various regression models to calculate the perspective computation time. This helps understand why a certain processor is faster for certain sets of tasks. It also provides the essential information for scheduling on heterogeneous systems. In addition, this dissertation investigates a high-level task scheduling framework for heterogeneous processor systems in which, the pros and cons of using different heterogeneous processors can complement each other. Thus a higher performance can be achieve on heterogeneous computing systems. A new scheduling algorithm with four innovations is presented: Ranked Opportunistic Balancing (ROB), Multi-subject Ranking (MR), Multi-subject Relative Ranking (MRR), and Automatic Small Tasks Rearranging (ASTR). The new algorithm consistently outperforms previously proposed algorithms with better scheduling results, lower computational complexity, and more consistent results over a range of performance prediction errors. Finally, this work extends the heterogeneous task scheduling algorithm to handle power capping feature. It demonstrates that a power-aware scheduler significantly improves the power efficiencies and saves the energy consumption. This suggests that, in addition to performance benefits, heterogeneous systems may have certain advantages on overall power efficiency

A versatile programming model for dynamic task scheduling on cluster computers

This dissertation studies the development of application programs for parallel and distributed computer systems, especially PC clusters. A methodology is proposed to increase the efficiency of code development, the productivity of programmers and enhance performance of executing the developed programs on PC clusters while facilitating improvement of scalability and code portability of these programs. A new programming model, named the Super-Programming Model (SPM), is created. Programs are developed assuming an instruction set architecture comprised of SuperInstructions (SIs). SPM models the target system as a large Virtual Machine (VM); VM contains functional units which are underlain with sub-computer systems and SIs are implemented with codes. When these functional units execute SIs, their codes will run on member computers to perform the corresponding operations. This approach resembles the process of designing instruction sets for microprocessors but the VM employs much coarser instructions and data structures. SIs use Super-Data Blocks (SDBs) as their operands. Each SI is assigned to a single member computer and is indivisible (i.e., its implementation is not interrupted for I/O). SIs have predictable execution times because SDB sizes are limited by predefined thresholds. These qualities of SIs help dynamic load balancing. Employing software to implement instructions makes this approach more flexible. The developed programs fit to architectures of cluster systems better. SPM provides mechanisms, such as dynamic load balancing, to assure the efficient execution of programs. The vast majority of current programming models lack such mechanisms for distributed environments that suffer from long communication latencies. Since SPM employs coarse-grain tasks, the overall management overhead is small. SDB access can often overlap the execution of other SIs; a cache system further decreases average memory latencies. Since all SDBs are virtual entities, with the runtime system support, they can be accessed in parallel and efficiently minimizes additional constraints to parallelism from underlying computer systems. In this research, a reference implementation of VM has been developed. A performance estimation model is developed that takes these features into account. Finally, the definition of scalability for parallel/distributed processing is refined to represent a multi-dimensional entity. Sample cases are analyzed

Enhanced Cuckoo Search Algorithm for Virtual Machine Placement in Cloud Data Centers

In order to enhance resource utilisation and power efficiency in cloud data centres it is important to perform Virtual Machine (VM) placement in an optimal manner. VM placement uses the method of mapping virtual machines to physical machines (PM). Cloud computing researchers have recently introduced various meta-heuristic algorithms for VM placement considering the optimised energy consumption. However, these algorithms do not meet the optimal energy consumption requirements. This paper proposes an Enhanced Cuckoo Search (ECS) algorithm to address the issues with VM placement focusing on the energy consumption. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using three different workloads in CloudSim tool. The evaluation process includes comparison of the proposed algorithm against the existing Genetic Algorithm (GA), Optimised Firefly Search (OFS) algorithm, and Ant Colony (AC) algorithm. The comparision results illustrate that the proposed ECS algorithm consumes less energy than the participant algorithms while maintaining a steady performance for SLA and VM migration. The ECS algorithm consumes around 25% less energy than GA, 27% less than OFS, and 26% less than AC