A Survey of Dynamic Power Saving Strategies in Real Systems

Energy efficiency and energy-proportional computing have become major constraints in the design of modern exascale platforms. Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is one of the most commonly used and effective techniques to dynamically reduce power consumption based on workload characteristics. The focus of this paper is to survey several energy saving strategies designed for improving power efficiency of CPU and DRAM systems. This paper also presents a characterization of the strategies based on their salient features, to help the research community in gaining insights into the similarities and differences between the them. The aim of the paper is to equip researchers with knowledge of the state of the art energy saving strategies and serve as a quick reference to engineers while they are devising novel energy saving strategies.