Enhanced reliability-aware power management through shared recovery technique

While Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) remains as a popular energy management technique for real-time embedded applications, recent research has identified significant and negative impact of voltage scaling on system reliability. For this reason, a number of reliability-aware power management (RA-PM) schemes were recently proposed to preserve the system reliability when DVS is used. In this paper, we propose a new approach, called the shared recovery (SHR) technique, to minimize the system-level energy consumption while still preserving the system´s original reliability. The main idea of the SHR technique is to avoid the offline allocation of separate recovery tasks to the scaled tasks by assigning a global/shared recovery block that can be used by any task at run-time. Our simulation results show that, compared to the existing RA-PM schemes, our scheme can achieve up to 35% energy savings. Further, this performance is shown to be comparable to the maximum energy savings that can be achieved by any algorithm. Interestingly, our extensive evaluation indicates that SHR offers also non-trivial gains over the previous algorithms on the reliability side. Further, a dynamic extension is proposed to improve energy and reliability management at run-time by reducing the size of the recovery block and re-using the slack that arises from early completions.