ENTRA · Whole-Systems Energy Transparency

This project proposes an energy-aware system development approach covering hardware, software and the run-time environment. The central goal is to make energy usage transparent through the system layers, thus enabling optimizations both during code development and at run-time.<br/>The project work packages will develop novel program analysis and energy modelling techniques. Tools incorporating these techniques will enable energy optimizations both during code development and at run-time, helping to promote energy efficiency to a first-class software design objective. The project will also develop a concept of optimality and a set of benchmarks allowing measurement of energy efficiency with respect to the minimal energy achievable by optimal utilization of existing hardware.<br/>Lack of energy transparency in today's system development tools means that much of the potential energy saving available from power-efficient hardware is wasted. The project departs from the approach of today's systems and development tools because energy transparency is at odds with a basic principle in modern software engineering - the desire to abstract away machine-level details in high-level code in the interests of portability, understandability and software reuse. By contrast, energy transparency requires making visible the effects of energy-saving features of modern processors.<br/>The project targets outcome (c) of Objective ICT-2011.9.8, namely to address software models and programming methodologies supporting the strive for the energetic limit (e.g. energy cost awareness or exploiting the trade-off between energy and performance/precision).<br/>