The emergence of extremely low-power computing components and efficient energy-harvesting power systems has led to the creation of computer systems that operate using tiny amounts of energy scavenged from their environment. These devices create opportunities for systems where batteries and tethered power are inapplicable: sensors deeply embedded in pervasive civil infrastructure, in-body health monitors, and devices in extreme environments like glaciers, volcanoes, and space. The key challenge is that these devices operate only intermittently, as energy is available, requiring both hardware and software to tolerate power failures that may happen hundreds of times per second. This talk will describe the landscape of intermittent computing systems. I will focus on new programming and execution models that are robust to arbitrarily frequent power failures. In particular, the talk will focus on three models, DINO, Chain, and Alpaca, which we developed as a progression toward a system that is simple to program and offers reliable intermittent operation. I will then discuss how these models interact with our latest hardware platform, Capybara, enabling applications to dynamically re-configure the amount of energy continuously required by a region of code and supporting modal energy demands with a single hardware mechanism. I will close with an overview of some lessons that I learned while naively moving into a new and emerging research area over the last five years.
Tue 19 JunDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
08:45 - 10:30 | |||
08:45 10mDay opening | Introduction and Welcome PLMW @ PLDI | ||
08:55 20mSocial Event | Icebreaker PLMW @ PLDI Michelle Strout University of Arizona | ||
09:15 45mTalk | What Programming Language Researchers Do and How to Become One PLMW @ PLDI Kathryn S McKinley Google | ||
10:00 30mTalk | Intermittent Computing Systems PLMW @ PLDI Brandon Lucia Carnegie Mellon University |