A scheduling model for reduced CPU energy

  • Authors:
  • F. Yao;A. Demers;S. Shenker

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • FOCS '95 Proceedings of the 36th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

The energy usage of computer systems is becoming an important consideration, especially for battery-operated systems. Various methods for reducing energy consumption have been investigated, both at the circuit level and at the operating systems level. In this paper, we propose a simple model of job scheduling aimed at capturing some key aspects of energy minimization. In this model, each job is to be executed between its arrival time and deadline by a single processor with variable speed, under the assumption that energy usage per unit time, P, is a convex function, of the processor speed s. We give an off-line algorithm that computes, for any set of jobs, a minimum-energy schedule. We then consider some on-line algorithms and their competitive performance for the power function P(s)=s/sup p/ where p/spl ges/2. It is shown that one natural heuristic, called the Average Rate heuristic, uses at most a constant times the minimum energy required. The analysis involves bounding the largest eigenvalue in matrices of a special type.