A Nonlinear Programming Approach for Dynamic Voltage Scaling

Abstract: Embedded computing systems in portable devices need to be energy efficient, yet they have to deliver adequate performance to the often computationally expensive applications. Dynamic voltage scaling is a technique that offers a speed versus power trade-off, allowing the application to achieve considerable energy savings and, at the same time, to meet the imposed time constraints. In this thesis, we explore the possibility of using optimal voltage scaling algorithms based on nonlinear programming at the system level, for a complex multiprocessor scheduling problem. We present an optimization approach to the modeled nonlinear programming formulation of the continuous voltage selection problem excluding the consideration of transition overheads. Our approach achieves the same optimal results as the previous work using the same model, but due to its speed, can be efficiently used for design space exploration. We validate our results using numerous automatically generated benchmarks.