Impact of virtual execution environments on processor energy consumption and hardware adaptation

During recent years, microprocessor energy consumption has been surging and efforts to reduce power and energy have received a lot of attention. At the same time, virtual execution environments (VEEs), such as Java virtual machines, have grown in popularity. Hence, it is important to evaluate the impact of virtual execution environments on microprocessor energy consumption. This paper characterizes the energy and power impact of two important components of VEEs, Just-in-time (JIT) optimization and garbage collection. We find that by reducing instruction counts, JIT optimization significantly reduces energy consumption, while garbage collection incurs runtime overhead that consumes more energy. Importantly, both JIT optimization and garbage collection decrease the average power dissipated by a program. Detailed analysis reveals that both JIT optimizer and JIT optimized code dissipate less power than un-optimized code. On the other hand, being memory bound and with low ILP, the garbage ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: VEE
• Authors: Shiwen Hu, Lizy Kurian John
• Keywords: Energy Consumption, Garbage Collection, Microprocessor Energy Consumption, VEE 2006, Virtualization