Computer Systems Architecture

Computer Architecture is the science and art of interconnecting hardware to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals. This is one of the core stages that any organization intending to go green in technology needs to carefully scrutinize in order to achieve their goal.  The idea is not to reduce the computer’s performance but to create a system that functions efficiently, utilizing all the resources available, and that fits the requirements of the organization. The backbone of going green in computer systems is saving energy or minimizing energy consumption. First the materials used to make the systems should be able to be recycled at the end of their tenure. This includes the plastics/ metal used to make the casing and some of the components inside. The school should buy systems from suppliers that offer recycling plans.

The organization should not buy systems that have more specs than they require, as this will be a waste of money and also energy resources as a lot of power will be needed to run a very powerful machine. Using energy efficient processors like the Athlon 64 X2 Dual core will be very beneficial to the energy saving cause. Although the processor costs more than a regular processor, the organization will be able to make their money back through energy savings. There is also the Asus EPU, the world’s first power saving engine, it provides a total system power saving by detecting current PC loadings and intelligently moderating power in real-time. With auto phase switching for components ( which includes CPU, VGA card, memory, chipset, hard drives and CPU cooler/ system fans), the EPU provides the most appropriate power usage via intelligent  acceleration and overclocking, helping save power and energy.

Power aware compilation is a technique used by system architects to produce the most efficiently functioning processors. There are many methods that can be used, and one of them is called windowed register file, this approach provides a larger number of physical registers than allowed by the instruction set encoding. These registers are displayed as a set of windows, and at any point in the execution only one window is active, therefore operand specifies refer to the registers in the active window.

( http://cccp.eecs.umich.edu/research/poweraware.php). Fans contribute a large percentage of power consumption there fore they need to be regulated and controlled. Pulse-width modulation(PMW) is a popular method fan control, it reads the digital temperature censors on each core of the CPU and switches the input voltage between fully on and fully off, depending on the readings.