Energy aware software: Issues, approaches and challenges

Reducing the power dissipation and energy consumption of computing systems is an important challenge for system designers. From hand-held devices, drawing energy from batteries, to large scale datacenters, having as energy consumption several MWh, the development of energy reduction techniques is a key enabler to get a continuous performance increase of computing systems. The development of energy reduction techniques requires an overall view and deep understanding of the underlying software, middleware and hardware. At the same time, computing system designers have always a set of system requirements to fulfill. Manifestly, this always leads to trade-offs between energy consumption and other system requirements. This paper provides insights on the current issues, approaches and challenges computing system designers are facing when developing energy aware platforms. The main focus is put on two important aspects of system design: a) how to energy efficiently map a software application on hardware components and b) how to energy efficiently manage system behavior changes at runtime.