Energy types

Abstract

This paper presents a novel type system to promote and facilitate energy-aware programming. Energy Types is built upon a key insight into today's energy-efficient systems and applications: despite the popular perception that energy and power can only be described in joules and watts, real-world energy management is often based on discrete phases and modes, which in turn can be reasoned about by type systems very effectively. A phase characterizes a distinct pattern of program workload, and a mode represents an energy state the program is expected to execute in. This paper describes a programming model where phases and modes can be intuitively specified by programmers or inferred by the compiler as type information. It demonstrates how a type-based approach to reasoning about phases and modes can help promote energy efficiency. The soundness of our type system and the invariants related to inter-phase and inter-mode interactions are rigorously proved. Energy Types is implemented as the core of a prototyped object-oriented language ET for smartphone programming. Preliminary studies show ET can lead to significant energy savings for Android Apps.