#power_management

So the story goes like this…

I came back to ASU from Stone Ridge Technology with an incredible summer internship working on state-of-the-art FPGA RTL designs. Everyone working in this small start-up had a research mindset. This was intellectually very satisfying for me. Then, I met two more incredible folks: Prof. Martin Reisslein and Prof. Umit Ogras. They both helped me in unique ways to look at the research. I took Martin’s class in which he reinforced the need for surveying prior art. Umit joined ASU in Fall 2013 as an assistant professor. Frequent interactions with him made me very excited about exploring power management techniques in smartphones. Since the foundation of the power management techniques are power and performance models, we started exploring these models. In particular, we found a generalized form of Amdhal’s law. We got the idea for the performance model from a seminal paper from Hill and Marty on “Amdahl’s Law in the Multicore Era”. This gave the very first lesson about research. If we write a paper that is well thought out and easy to read, it will lead to more research ideas for everyone. We wrote the performance model and then my initial thought was to only publish the performance model that could be used for heterogeneous systems. However, Umit insisted that only the performance model was not sufficient for a good publication (rightly so!). This is because we need more mature ideas that not only show new models but also how they are useful.

“All models are wrong; some models are useful.” - George E. P. Box