Seminar: Energy-efficient Algorithms

Energy has become a scarce and expensive resource. This also holds true for many computing environments. Power dissipation is critical in portable devices, such as laptops and mobile phones, in which the capacity of a battery is limited. Furthermore, electricity costs impose a substantial strain on the budget of computing and data centers so that effective power management strategies are required. This seminar will study algorithmic techniques for energy savings. The following three topics will be covered.

• Power-down mechanisms: If a system is idle for a certain time period, it can be transitioned into low-power stand-by or sleep states. The goal is to find state transition schedules minimizing the overall energy consumption.
• Dynamic Speed Scaling: Many modern microprocessors can run at variable speed/frequency. High speed implies high performance but also high energy consumption. The goal is to utilize the full speed/frequency spectrum of a processor and to apply low speed levels whenever possible.
• Networks: The goal is to solve various routing and data transmission problems, typically with the objective to minimize the total transmission energy.

The seminar talks can be presented in German or English, depending on the preference of the students.

1. S. Irani, S. K. Shukla and R. K. Gupta. Online strategies for dynamic power management in systems with multiple power-saving states. ACM Trans. Embedded Comput. Syst. 2(3): 325-346, 2003.
   
2. J. Augustine, S. Irani, and C. Swamy. Optimal power-down strategies. SIAM J. Comput, 37(5): 1499-1516, 2008.
   
3. S. Albers. On energy conservation in data centers. 2017.
   
4. P. Baptiste. Scheduling unit tasks to minimize the number of idle periods: A polynomial time algorithm for offline dynamic power management. Proc. 17th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 364-367, 2006.
   
5. F. Yao, A. Demers and S. Shenker. A scheduling model for reduced CPU energy. Proc. 36th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 374-382, 1995.
   M. Li, F. F. Yao. An efficient algorithm for computing optimal discrete voltage schedules. MFCS 2005: 652-663.
   
6. N. Bansal, T. Kimbrel and K. Pruhs. Speed scaling to manage energy and temperature. J. ACM 54(1): 2007.
   
7. S. Albers, F. Müller and S. Schmelzer. Speed scaling on parallel processors. Algorithmica 68(2): 404-425, 2014.
   
8. S. Albers, A. Antoniadis, G. Greiner. On multi-processor speed scaling with migration. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 81(7):1194-1209, 2015.
   
9. D. P. Bunde. Power-aware scheduling for makespan and flow. J. Scheduling 12(5): 489-500, 2009.
   
10. S. Irani, S. Shukla and R. Gupta. Algorithms for power savings. ACM Transactions on Algorithms 3(4), 2007.
11. S. Albers and A. Antoniadis. Race to idle: New algorithms for speed scaling with a sleep state. ACM Trans. Algorithms 10(2): 9:1-9:31, 2014.
12. L. Becchetti, P. Korteweg, A. Marchetti-Spaccamela, M. Skutella, L. Stougie and A. Vitaletti. Latency-Constrained Aggregation in Sensor Networks. ACM Transactions on Algorithms 6(1), 2009.