Peak power minimizing algorithm by voltage scheduling

For complicated electronic systems, to ensure high performance and reliability satisfaction, minimizing peak power consumption becomes one of the most important design goals. This paper addresses the problem of variable voltage scheduling on multiprocessor distributed systems, with the goal of shaping the power profile to minimizing peak power. A low peak power algorithm named LPPA is proposed to optimize power distribution via scaling voltage of the tasks on critical regions, based on the comprehensive analysis of how power consumption varies with latency. Compared with previous low peak power techniques, which simply scale voltage of tasks according to their timing critical degree, LPPA additionally take the power profile into count to further decrease the peak power. Experimental results show that the proposed voltage scheduling technique significantly improves the power characteristics over the existing power profile unaware scheduling technique. Meanwhile, energy consumption reduction is also obtained.