Energy-aware Parallel Computing

Power efficient computing systems have drawn the attention in the last years, due to both environmental and economical reasons. Clearly, this has implications also on how parallel programs exploit their execution platform. The focus of the PPM group in this fields regard the devising of power aware management policies and runtime systems that allow the execution of parallel programs able to satisfy some user requirements in terms of performances and power consumption. Power management policies must be put in place to switch off unused computing facilities–if possible– as well as to employ the required facilities using the most effective set of parameters. In particular, in a scenario where frequency of single cores or of groups of cores in a socket may be dynamically varied (frequency scaling) or single cores or groups of cores may be dynamically switched on and off, the choice of parallelism degree to use–i.e. of how many cores to switch/keep on–and of which frequency setting to use–i.e. what speed is to be used on each of the powered cores–are critical. On the other hand,  a power aware runtime system  must be able to dynamically find and adopt the best application configuration while the application is running, in order to adapt the computation to changing execution conditions.

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