An integrated approach to system-level CPU and memory energy efficiency on computing systems

Energy-efficient computing is becoming more important with the latest technology improvements. State-of-the-art dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS) policies manage resources´ voltage and frequency to achieve higher energy efficiency. A DVFS policy manages a single resource by continuously evaluating its utilization. We propose a new integrated DVFS policy that manages both CPU and memory. The policy selects their frequency/voltage based on resources´ combined state, rather than evaluating isolated information about each resource. For the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark, results show that our policy has an average of 9.04% energy efficiency improvement for CPU and memory compared to 4.84% savings by an independent policy.