Performance evaluation and energy consumption of a real-time heterogeneous grid system using DVS and DPM

Energy consumption of large scale systems has been severely studied due to economic and ecological reasons. This paper studies energy gains that come from the application of two popular energy saving techniques, Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) and Dynamic Power Management (DPM), in a real-time 2-level heterogeneous grid system. While these techniques generally work in a competitive way, we show that under certain circumstances they can work together and achieve greater savings when they are both applied at the processor level. A simulation model is used to evaluate the performance of the system. Experimental results show encouraging energy savings up to 46% and minimum performance degradation when both energy saving techniques are applied.