Article

Intermittent computation without hardware support or programmer intervention

Authors:

Joel Van Der Woude,

Matthew HicksAuthors Info & Claims

OSDI'16: Proceedings of the 12th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation

Pages 17 - 32

Published: 02 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

As computation scales downward in area, the limitations imposed by the batteries required to power that computation become more pronounced. Thus, many future devices will forgo batteries and harvest energy from their environment. Harvested energy, with its frequent power cycles, is at odds with current models of long-running computation.

To enable the correct execution of long-running applications on harvested energy--without requiring special-purpose hardware or programmer intervention--we propose Ratchet. Ratchet is a compiler that adds lightweight checkpoints to unmodified programs that allow existing programs to execute across power cycles correctly. Ratchet leverages the idea of idempotency, decomposing programs into a continuous stream of re-executable sections connected by lightweight checkpoints, stored in non-volatile memory. We implement Ratchet on top of LLVM, targeted at embedded systems with high-performance non-volatile main memory. Using eight embedded systems benchmarks, we show that Ratchet correctly stretches program execution across frequent, random power cycles. Experimental results show that Ratchet enables a range of existing programs to run on intermittent power, with total run-time overhead averaging below 60%--comparable to approaches that require hardware support or programmer intervention.

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OSDI'16: Proceedings of the 12th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation

November 2016

786 pages

ISBN:9781931971331

Program Chairs:
Kimberly Keeton
Hewlett Packard Labs
,
Timothy Roscoe
ETH Zurich

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VMware
NetApp
Google Inc.
Microsoft: Microsoft
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SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems

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USENIX Association

United States

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Published: 02 November 2016

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Cited By

Sah PHicks M(2023)Hitchhiker's Guide to Secure Checkpointing on Energy-Harvesting SystemsProceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting & Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems10.1145/3628353.3628542(8-15)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628353.3628542
Choi JZeng JLee DMin CJung CSolihin YHeinrich M(2023)Write-Light Cache for Energy Harvesting SystemsProceedings of the 50th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1145/3579371.3589098(1-13)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579371.3589098
Kortbeek VGhosh SHester JCampanoni SPawełczak PJhala RDillig I(2022)WARio: efficient code generation for intermittent computingProceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3519939.3523454(777-791)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2022
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