A New Standard for Power-Aware Programming

New enhancements to mobile computers including smaller sensors, displays and powerful processors have made them much more attractive for the battlefield, not only as wearable systems for soldiers, but also unattended ground sensors a warfighter can leave behind for situational awareness. Unfortunately, while the technologies for hands-free interfacing have improved greatly, the challenge of limiting power and weight still exist. The latest generation of mobile processors enables smartphones that can remain idle for days, or operate for an entire trans-continental flight under heavy-use. These advancements have mainly been achieved with low-power-by-design approaches which allow processors to consume less energy when not in use. Unfortunately, scenarios requiring persistent use, such as an unattended ground sensor or providing situational awareness to a soldiers head-mounted display are considered heavy-use and the feasibility of mobile processors for extended mission times is severely diminished. In order to realize the full potential of these processors under extended mission times, the Army needs more performance-power flexibility than simply a binary in-use/not-in-use state. New hardware and software approaches are needed to enable a continuum of tunable performance-power ratios. We propose implementing an OpenMP-like library to enable software and hardware control to achieve this level of power-aware programming.