Software Coding and Compiling Techniques for Energy and Power Aware Computing

The combination of the compiler and coding style plays an important role in the application’s performance, power, and energy consumption. This study provides a recommendation system for achieving efficient energy consumption. It demonstrates - via experimentation - that to achieve a balance between the performance, power, and energy consumption, the combination of compiler and coding style should be deviced in a way that works best for the target-machine architecture and the system constraints. The study performed experimentation on four different compilers and three selected coding styles, with an in-depth analysis of the two compilers with the most different results, showing how different coding practices could produce different performance and energy consumption for the same problem, along with the compiler selection that affects not only the application's performance but also the energy consumption. The study also elaborates on why the different compilers and styles are generating significant differences in performance and power measurements. Validation of the research findings was performed on SQLite3, a popular open source application, resulting 19.28% power reduction, 9.52% energy reduction, and 14.22% decrease in execution time.