Energy-Efficient Mapping Technique for Virtual Cores

Virtualization provides an excellent solution to resolve the portability, maintainability, development, and utilization problems in many system designs. In this paper, we are interested in energy-efficient designs for platform virtualization. In particular, we explore the computing resource mapping and the energy consumption relationship between virtual cores and physical cores when timing constraints in task executions are considered. Real-time and non-real-time task workloads are both considered in the study, where the computing needs of each virtual core are modeled with a computing server. A prototype with dynamic-voltage-scaling support is implemented based on a μ-kernel architecture. The capability and overheads of the proposed design was evaluated, for which we have encouraging results.