Title:  A Software Framework for Application-guided Power-aware Control Systems

Committee: 

Dr. Ferri, Advisor 

Dr. Chatterjee, Chair

Dr. Yalamanchili

Abstract:

The purpose of this research is to develop proactive management of power and performance trade-offs through greater cooperation between applications and computer hardware.  To enable such a management system, the proposed work is a software framework for application-guided power-aware control systems.  This system allows an application to guide the underlying computing hardware through a reusable and modular software abstraction.  This abstraction layer enables an application to avoid hardware-specific details while still requesting resources from the computing hardware using a generic quality-of-service (QoS) interface.  The computing system, in turn, monitors its current power and performance state and notifies the application to adjust its computational load by changing its algorithms.  This two-way communication between application and computing platform allows both application and system designers to create proactive strategies for managing power and performance states. Our framework consists of the three major components: the physical system controller, the quality-of-service (QoS) manager, and the computer power and performance controller (CPPC).  The QoS manager and CPPC are designed to be reusable for any physical system controller and underlying hardware.  The physical system controller is a software application used to control an underlying physical system (e.g. motors, sensors, etc.).  In our experimental system, the physical system controller is an obstacle-avoiding autonomous robot.