Power Management from Handhelds to DataCenters: Chasing the Next 10X Improvements

September 15, 2006
Partha Ranganathan | Hewlett Packard Labs

Energy and power are increasingly becoming critical challenges in the design of future computing systems. The SmartPower project at hp labs seeks to address these challenges through holistic solutions, across multiple levels of the system, and optimized for the overall end-user experience. In this talk, I will motivate the power management challenge and present a systematic taxonomy of inefficiencies that lead to overconsumption of power. I will then present results from four major projects that address these inefficiencies – energy-aware user interfaces, heterogeneity-based architectures, ensemble-level power control, and integrated IT/facilities resource provisioning. Though these approaches straddle different market segments and different levels of the system, they all achieve dramatic improvements, with factors of two to twenty reduction in the power consumption. I will conclude with a discussion of some of the toolsets developed as part of this project and ongoing and future work.

Speaker Details

Partha Ranganathan is currently a principal research scientist at Hewlett Packard Labs. His research interests are in computer architecture and parallel processing with a focus on performance, power, manageability, and evaluation. Partha’s recent research has focused on power-efficient solutions across the entire computing continuum. His past work has focused on application-optimized architecture design, and performance, programmability, and simulation of multiprocessing systems. Partha currently leads the blades++ program at HP Labs investigating next-generation system architectures for enterprise environments. Partha received his B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Rice University, Houston. He was a primary developer of the publicly distributed Rice Simulator for ILP Multiprocessors (RSIM), and is a recipient of the Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughan fellowship and an IIT Madras Alumni Award.