Comparing System-Level Power Management Policies

Reducing power consumption is a challenge to system designers. Portable systems, such as laptop computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs), draw power from batteries, so reducing power consumption extends their operating times. For desktop computers or servers, high power consumption raises temperature and deteriorates performance and reliability. Soaring energy prices and rising concern about the environmental impact of electronics systems further highlight the importance of low power consumption. Power reduction techniques can be classified as static and dynamic. Static techniques, such as synthesis and compilation for low power, are applied at design time. In contrast, dynamic techniques use runtime behavior to reduce power when systems are serving light workloads or are idle. These techniques are known as dynamic power management (DPM). DPM can be achieved in different ways; for example, dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) changes supply voltage at runtime as a method of power management. Here, we use DPM specifically for shutting down unused I/O devices. We built an experimental environment on a laptop computer running Microsoft Windows. We implemented existing power management policies and quantitatively compared their effects on power saving and performance degradation.