DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
Wednesday 7.20 -
10.00 P.M.
Innovation Hall Room 139
Description: With the on-going miniaturization 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,
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. However, the students who did not take 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. The
course is open to both Ph.D. students and advanced M.S. students.
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, 3.00 – 4.00 PM; Thursday, 7.20 –
8.20 PM (Office: ST II, Room 401)
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.