George Mason University
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

CS 699-004 / CS-IT 803-003

Low-Power Computing

Spring 2005

Thursday 4.30 - 7.10 P.M.
ENT 176

Instructor: Dr. Hakan Aydin

Description: With the on-going minitiaturization of computing devices, Power/Energy Management has quickly become one of the focal points in Computer Science/Engineering research. The advent of battery-powered embedded computing and mobile, ad-hoc and sensor networks increases the scope and significance of low-power computing research. Recently, there has been also growing interest in power management issues for web servers and internet data server farms. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix, and Toshiba have recently developed an open industry standard (ACPI) for power management on desktops, servers and laptops proving the equally pressing priority of the area for the industry.

This is a seminar type course with strong emphasis on hot research issues in system-level low-power computing. As such, the focus will be on operating systems-, network- and application-level power management techniques. Most of the existing techniques attempt to obtain energy savings at the cost of degraded operation (e.g. reduced throughput, speed or transmission range) yielding novel and intriguing Computer Science Problems: how to keep the network connected with reduced transmission ranges, how to meet all the deadlines with reduced CPU speed, how to provide acceptable QoS guarantees for multimedia streams with reduced frame rates, and many others. An emerging class of problems deal with maximizing system performance in the context of systems that must remain functional for a given operation/mission time with a fixed energy budget (energy-constrained operation).

During the term, we will present, discuss and evaluate various papers in Operating Systems, Real-Time Systems and Networking research on low-power computing. Through a comprehensive term project, the students will be able to focus on a well-defined area of low-power computing and perform a preliminary research. There will be no exams. The course is particularly suitable for PhD students and advanced MS students interested in hot research issues in the general Systems area. A tentative list of discussion topics include:

Prerequisites: CS 571 and CS 656 (No exceptions). However, the students who did not take any of these courses are encouraged to contact the instructor if they believe that their background (in operating systems and networks) is strong enough to succeed in the course. This course is being offered concurrently as CS/IT 803-003 and CS 699-004, and is open to both Ph.D. students and advanced M.S. students.

Readings:
The field is brand new, and there is no required textbook for the course. Most of the course material will be provided by the instructor and through recent research articles.

Office Hours: Wednesday: 4.00 PM - 5.00 PM, Thursday: 7.20 PM - 8.20 PM and by appointment.


Grading: Presentations: During the first part of the course, the instructor will present the fundamentals of low-power computing and main research problems of the area. In the second part, the students will present articles from recent conference/workshop proceedings and journals. A list of suggested papers will be provided, however, the student suggestions are welcome. The (in-class) presentation will include a critical evaluation and discussion of the paper. The students will be required to read, and submit a brief summary/evaluation of the papers presented in class.

Term Project: Each student is expected to complete a term project and submit a research paper/report by the end of the term. Again, a list of potential projects will be provided; but students may define their own project as long as the project has sufficient scope/complexity and the instructor's approval is obtained. A term project may be in any of the following forms: GMU Honor Code will be strictly enforced. We reserve the right to use MOSS to detect plagiarism. Violations of GMU Honor Code will result in an F.