Proactive and Adaptive Energy-Aware Programming with Mixed Typechecking
Published in Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2017
Application-level energy management is an important dimension of energy optimization. In this paper, we introduce ENT, a novel programming language for enabling proactive and adaptive mode-based energy management at the application level. The proactive design allows programmers to apply their application knowledge to energy management, by characterizing the energy behavior of different program fragments with modes. The adaptive design allows such characterization to be delayed until run time, useful for capturing dynamic program behavior dependent on program states, configuration settings, external battery levels, or CPU temperatures. The key insight is both proactiveness and adaptiveness can be unified under a type system combined with static typing and dynamic typing. ENT has been implemented as an extension to Java, and successfully ported to three energy-conscious platforms: an Intel-based laptop, a Raspberry Pi, and an Android phone. Evaluation shows ENT improves the programmability, debuggability, and energy efficiency of battery-aware and temperature-aware programs.