Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-68).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Idaho, 2005. / Also available online in PDF format. Abstract. "July, 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-98).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 188-189.

High power dissipation and on-chip temperature limit performance and affect reliability in modern microprocessors. For servers and data centers, they determine the cooling cost, whereas for handheld and mobile systems, they limit the continuous usage of these systems. For mobile systems, energy consumption affects the battery life. It can not be ignored for desktop and server systems as well, as the contribution of energy continues to go up in organizations’ budgets, influencing strategic decisions, and its implications on the environment are getting appreciated. Intelligent trade-offs involving these quantities are critical to meet the performance demands of many modern applications. Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) offers a huge potential for designing trade-offs involving energy, power, temperature and performance of computing systems. In our work, we propose and evaluate DVFS schemes that aim at minimizing energy consumption while meeting a performance constraint, for both sequential and parallel applications. We propose a Petri net based program performance model, parameterized by application properties, microarchitectural settings and system resource configuration, and use this model to find energy efficient DVFS settings. We first propose a DVFS scheme using this model for sequential programs running on single core multiple clock domain (MCD) processors, and evaluate this on a MCD processor simulator. We then extend this scheme for data parallel (Single Program Multiple Data style) applications, and then generalize it for stream applications as well, and evaluate these two schemes on a full system CMP simulator. Our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed schemes achieve significant energy savings for a small performance degradation.