Inter-program Optimizations for Disk Energy Reduction

Previous work has shown that intra-program optimizations, i.e., optimizations performed on individual programs in isolation, can be very effective in reducing disk energy in streaming applications. This paper investigates the potential additional benefits of inter-program optimizations where sets of programs are optimized together. Experimental results on different subsets of three streaming applications show that 7–49% additional energy savings (27.3% on average) can be obtained with negligible performance penalties using two novel inter-program optimizations, namely execution context sensitive buffer size selection and inverse barrier synchronization. These figures were obtained via physical measurements on two laptop disks.