Program counter based techniques for dynamic power management

Reducing energy consumption has become one of the major challenges in designing future computing systems. This paper proposes a novel idea of using program counters to predict I/O activities in the operating system. The paper presents a complete design of Program-Counter Access Predictor (PCAP) that dynamically learns the access patterns of applications and predicts when an I/O device can be shut down to save energy. PCAP uses path-based correlation to observe a particular sequence of program counters leading to each idle period, and predicts future occurrences of that idle period. PCAP differs from previously proposed shutdown predictors in its ability to: (1) correlate I/O operations to particular behavior of the applications and users, (2) carry prediction information across multiple executions of the applications, and (3) attain better energy savings while incurring low mispredictions.