Potential Key to Lowering Energy Costs of Cell Phones and Data Centers

AUSTIN, Texas — A systematic analysis of power usage in microprocessors could help lower the energy consumption of both small cellphones and giant data centers, report computer science professors from The University of Texas at Austin and the Australian National University. Their results may point the way to how companies such as Google, Apple, Intel and Microsoft can make software and hardware that will lower the energy costs of very small and very large devices. "The less power cellphones draw, the longer the battery will last," says Kathryn McKinley , professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin. "For companies like Google and Microsoft, which run these enormous data centers, there is a big incentive to find ways to be more power efficient. More and more of the money they're spending isn't going toward buying the hardware, but toward the power the data centers draw." McKinley says that without detailed analysis or power profiles of how microprocessors function with different software and different chip architectures, companies are limited in their ability to optimize for energy usage. The study she conducted with Stephen M. Blackburn of the Australian National University and their graduate students is the first to systematically measure and analyze application power, performance and energy on a wide variety of hardware. This work was recently invited to appear as a Research Highlight in the of the Association for Computer Machinery.