Energy Efficiency through Burstiness

OS resource management policies traditionally employ buffering to “smooth out” fluctuations in resource demand. By minimizing the length of idle periods and the level of contention during non-idle periods, such smoothing tends to maximize overall throughput and minimize the latency of individual requests. For certain important devices, however (disks, network interfaces, or even computational elements), smoothing eliminates opportunities to save energy using low-power modes. As devices with such modes proliferate, and as energy efficiency becomes an increasingly important design consideration, we argue that OS policies should be redesigned to increase burstiness for energy-