Currentcy: Unifying Policies for Resource Management

The global system nature of energy creates challenges in developing operating system policies to effectively manage energy consumption. Our proposed currentcy model creates the framework for the operating system to manage energy as a first-class resource. Furthermore, currentcy provides a powerful mechanism to formulate unified energy management policies across diverse competing applications and spanning devices with very different power characteristics. We claim that unifying energy management enables more coherent and efficient energy consumption. This paper presents an initial exploration of the policy space enabled by the currentcy model as implemented in ECOSystem, our Linux-based prototype. We use ECOSystem to attack four specific energyrelated goals: 1) currentcy conserving scheduling algorithms that reduce residual battery capacity, 2) proportional energy sharing, 3) response time variation, and 4) energy efficient disk management. Our results show that the currentcy model is a powerful framework for expressing better energy management policies than those that come from the traditional perdevice approach.