ABSTRACT
The performance of modern processors has increased at the expense of drastically increased power consumption. The increased power consumption not only reduces the operation time for battery-powered embedded systems (such as PDAs and laptops), but also increases the sophistication/cost of the cooling infrastructures for dense clusters (such as web servers). Therefore, energy has been promoted to be a first-class resource in a system [45] and power aware computing has emerged to be a major research area, which aims at “using the right amount of energy in the right place at the right time” [23]. Various studies have been conducted to manage power consumption of different components in a system (such as CPU, memory, disk, and network interfaces), interested readers are referred to References 16 and 20 for more comprehensive information. In this chapter, we focus on CPU power consumption when executing a set of real-time tasks on multiprocessor platforms.
