[CSEE Talk] talk: Why applications are still draining our batteries, and how we can help, Noon Tue 3/1

[Tim Finin]

              Why applications are still draining our
                  batteries, and how we can help

                Aaron Schulman, Stanford University

           12:00-1:00pm Tuesday, 01 March 2016, ITE325b

Application developers lack tools to profile and compare the
energy consumption of different software designs. This
energy-optimization task is challenging because of unpredictable
interactions between the application and increasingly complex
power management logic. Yet, having accurate power information
would allow application developers to both avoid inefficient
designs and discover opportunities for new optimizations.

In this talk, I will show that it is possible to accurately
measure system-level power and attribute it to application
activities. I will present BattOr, a portable, easy-to-use power
monitor that provides developers with a profile of the energy
consumption of their designs—without modifications to hardware or
software. I will show how Google developers are using BattOr to
improve Chrome’s energy efficiency. I will also show how
fine-grained understanding of cellular power at different signal
strengths enables novel energy optimizations. Finally, I will
describe my future plans to attribute system-level power to
individual hardware components and to investigate opportunities
presented by instrumenting every server in a data center with
fine-grained power monitoring.


Aaron Schulman is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford working with
Sachin Katti; he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the
University of Maryland, where he was advised by Neil Spring. His
research interests are in low-power embedded systems, wireless
communication, and network measurement. Aaron’s research on the
BattOr power monitor has been funded by Google, is being
commercialized by his startup Mellow Research, and is becoming
Google’s de facto standard tool for measuring the energy
consumption of the Chrome web browser. For his dissertation,
Aaron provided the first observations of fundamental factors that
limit the reliability of the Internet’s critical last-mile
infrastructure. His dissertation was selected to receive the the
2013 ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Host: Tim Finin, finin at umbc.edu

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