Influence of array allocation mechanisms on memory system energy

Portability and energy consumption have become increasingly important in mobile computing. Consequently, there is a clear need for energy-aware portable software design. This paper brings these two design considerations together by examining and optimizing the energy consumption of array allocation mechanisms in Java. Specifically, using a set of array-dominated benchmarks and a partitioned memory architecture with multiple low-power operating modes, we study two data optimization techniques: memory layout modification and array-interleaving. Our results show that these optimizations increase the effectiveness of energy savings due to power control of partitioned memory architectures across different memory configurations. It is observed that the memory energy can be significantly reduced using these techniques.