Step into Qinru Qiu’s lab at Binghamton University and you’ll see what appears to be a teenage boy’s fantasy: Rack after rack of sleek, black PlayStation 3 game systems.
And while she’s quick to explain that the PS3s are set up to emulate a multiprocessor, not for an epic showdown in Resident Evil, Qiu’s work may one day fuel new adolescent dreams.
Qinru Qiu’s work on low-power computing could lead to smaller computers that function more efficiently and use less power. Her work holds such promise, in fact, that the National Science Foundation awarded her a highly competitive $409,000, five-year Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program grant.
Qiu’s project, beginning in June, focuses on reducing the power demands of multiprocessor system-on-chip designs, which are starting to become more popular. PlayStation 3s, for instance, have one general purpose CPU and eight special synergistic processors.
A single processor can be very fast, but as its performance improves it requires more and more power. A multiprocessor, on the other hand, can deliver the same performance as numerous single processors at much lower power.
The benefits of cutting power demands include reduced energy consumption and lower manufacturing costs. Low-power designs can also improve reliability, since high power consumption increases the temperature of a chip, which harms its reliability.
Qiu, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said her goal is to cut back the power demands of microprocessors while maintaining performance.
“The basic idea is to slow the microprocessor down or put it into low-power mode when we’re not using it,” said Qiu, who believes the work has applications for everyday desktop machines as well as systems with high-end chips.
For example, the industry uses the idea of a “time out.” After a certain amount of time, the computer goes into this mode to save power.
“A simple way to improve the ‘time out’ is to dynamically adjust the time-out period,” Qiu said. “If we know that whenever the computer gets idle it will be idle for a long time, the time-out period will be short. But if we know the user’s working style is working after a half-second of rest, then we can set the time period to be longer, because we don’t want it to turn on and turn off very frequently.”
As part of the NSF project, Qiu will develop a new course on power management for senior-level undergraduates as well as graduate students. She is also teaching a system-on-chip class that was co-developed with local IBM engineers.
Qiu’s project will be the first systematic research for modeling, optimizing and evaluating adaptive and distributed power management for a large-scale multiprocessor system-on-chip design. And it comes at an opportune time, she said: Power demands have risen exponentially in the last couple of decades.
