Patent ID: 7386739

Claim:
A method for scheduling voltages and frequencies to minimize overall energy consumption of a computing system with bounded loss of system performance and to keep power dissipation under a fixed limit while minimizing performance loss, the method comprising: collecting performance data about a workload executing on each processor within a plurality of processors of the computing system; calculating a processor and memory intensity of the workload on each processor within the plurality of processors based on the collected performance data; calculating a predicted performance of the workload on each processor within the plurality of processors based on execution characteristics; calculating a predicted performance loss, based on the predicted performance at each of a plurality of available processor frequencies relative to a performance predicted for a maximum available frequency of all processors within the plurality of processors in the computing system; and selecting a lowest available frequency for each processor within the plurality of processors such that the predicted performance loss at the selected lowest available frequency versus the maximum available frequency is less than a performance loss bound.