Whole Systems Energy Transparency (or: More Power to Software Developers!)

Energy efficiency is now a major (if not the major) concern in electronic systems engineering. While hardware can be designed to save a modest amount of energy, the potential for savings are far greater at the higher levels of abstraction in the system stack. The greatest savings are expected from energy consumption-aware software. This talk emphasizes the importance of energy transparency from hardware to software as a foundation for energy-aware system design. Energy transparency enables a deeper understanding of how algorithms and coding impact on the energy consumption of a computation when executed on hardware. It is a key prerequisite for informed design space exploration and helps system designers to find the optimal tradeoff between performance, accuracy and energy consumption of a computation. Promoting energy efficiency to a first class software design goal is therefore an urgent research challenge. In this talk I will outline the first steps towards giving "more power" to software developers. We will cover energy monitoring of software, energy modelling at different abstraction levels, including insights into how data affects the energy consumption of a computation, and static analysis techniques for energy consumption estimation.

Bio

Kerstin Eder is a Reader in Design Automation and Verification at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bristol. She set up the Energy Aware COmputing (EACO) initiative (http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Research/eaco/) and leads the Verification and Validation for Safety in Robots research theme at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (http://www.brl.ac.uk/vv).

Her research is focused on specification, verification and analysis techniques which allow engineers to design a system and to verify/explore its behaviour in terms of functional correctness, performance and energy efficiency. Kerstin has gained extensive expertise in verifying complex microelectronic designs at leading semiconductor design and EDA companies. She seeks novel combinations of formal verification and analysis methods with state-of-the-art simulation/test-based approaches to achieve solutions that make a difference in practice.

Her most recent work includes Coverage-Driven Verification for robots that directly interact with humans, using assertion checks and theorem proving to verify control system designs, energy modelling of software and static analysis to predict the energy consumption of programs. She is particularly interested in safety assurance for learning machines and in software design for low power.

Kerstin has co-authored over 50 internationally refereed publications, was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering "Excellence in Engineering" prize and manages a portfolio of active research grants valued in excess of £1.7M.

She is currently Principal Investigator on the EPSRC projects "Robust Integrated Verification of Autonomous Systems" and "Trustworthy Robotic Assistants". She also leads the Bristol team working on the EC-funded Future and Emerging Technologies MINECC (Minimizing Energy Consumption of Computing to the Limit) collaborative research project ENTRA (Whole Systems Energy Transparency) which aims to promote energy efficiency to a first class software design goal.

Kerstin holds a PhD in Computational Logic, an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and an MEng in Informatics.