Thu Sep 22, 3:30-4:30, 4760 Boelter Hall

Compiler Optimizations for Energy Efficiency:
Energy-Aware Instruction Scheduling

Y.N. Srikant 
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

Power consumption in electronic systems has increased continuously
in the past few decades. With the advent of mobile electronic systems,
such as cell phones, media players, and most recently sensor networks,
it has become essential that batteries that power such systems last as
long as possible. One important aspect of research in building such
electronic systems concerns energy-efficient design of software.
Recent research in computer architecture proposes energy-saving
features for all components of a processor, such as function units,
buses, cache and main memory. Future compilers and operating systems
must make the best use of such features exposed by the architecture,
in addition to the applications becoming energy-aware.

In this talk, we will examine the important architectural and compiler
issues that help in saving energy. After a brief survey of such
techniques, we will present two algorithms for instruction scheduling,
which save power in complementary ways. The first saves power by
reducing the number of transitions of function units from active state
to idle state and vice-versa. The other proposes to use two types of
buses having different energy-latency characteristics in clustered
VLIW architectures.

About the Speaker:  Y.N. Srikant received his B.E in Electronics
from Bangalore University, and M.E and Ph.D in Computer Science
from the Computer Science and Automation department of the
Indian Institute of Science.  He was the recipient of Young Scientist
medal of the Indian National Science Academy in 1988.  His areas of
interest are compiler design and software components. He is the editor
of a handbook on advanced compiler design published by CRC Press
in 2002. His group's most recent research includes code generation
for clustered DSP architectures, compiler optimizations for power
reduction in embedded systems, JIT compilation and garbage collection,
and architectural innovations for efficient profiling and runtime
performance improvement of programs.

Prof. Srikant is currently the Chairman of Computer Science and Automation
at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

Host: Jens Palsberg