DATE: Thursday, January 25, 2001
TIME: Noon - 1 pm
PLACE: Wean Hall 8220

SPEAKER:
Carla Ellis
Duke University

TITLE:
Every Joule is Precious

ABSTRACT:
One of the major challenges of mobile/wireless computing is the need to reduce energy consumption, thereby extending battery lifetimes. This is a problem than must be addressed at all levels of system design. One of the questions being considered within our Milly Watt Project is what the role of the Operating System can be in reducing the energy consumption of the resources it manages. Memory is an unexplored, and particularly important, target for efforts to improve energy efficiency. New memory technology offers power management features with the ability to put individual DRAM chips in any one of several different power modes. This talk explores the interaction of page placement policies with static and dynamic hardware policies to exploit these emerging hardware features. Results from simulation experiments make a compelling case for a cooperative hardware/software approach for exploiting power-aware memory, with down to as little as 1% to 20% of the Energy*Delay for a traditional full-power memory.

This is joint work with Professors Alvin Lebeck and Amin Vahdat and graduate students Xiaobo Fan and Heng Zeng.

BIO:
Professor Ellis received the B.S. degree from the University of Toledo, Toledo OH, in 1972 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1977 and 1979. Before coming to Duke as an Associate Professor in 1986, she was a member of the Computer Science faculties at the University of Oregon, Eugene, from 1978 to 1980, and at the University of Rochester, Rochester NY, from 1980 to 1986. She is Past Chair of ACM SIGOPS and a member of CRA-W, the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research. Her past research interests have spanned multiprocessor memory management, parallel I/O, and distributed file systems. Her current interests include mobile computing and energy conservation within computer systems.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/