Date of Award

Spring 4-30-2018

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Open-Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Engineering

Advisor

Vincent Weaver

Second Committee Member

Richard Eason

Third Committee Member

Bruce Segee

Abstract

Power and energy are becoming important considerations in today's electronic equipment. The amount of power required to run a supercomputer for an hour could supply an ordinary household for many months. The need for low-power computing also extends to smaller devices, such as mobile phones, laptops and embedded devices.

In order to optimize power usage of electronic equipment, we need to collect information on the power consumption of these devices. Unfortunately it is not easy to do this on modern computing systems. Existing measuring equipment is often expensive, inaccurate, and difficult to operate. The main goal of this project is to create low-cost, accurate, stable, and easy-to-operate measurement equipment.

We design a low-cost low-overhead power measurement device using a Teensy embedded board. We then test our device by measuring the power consumption of a Raspberry Pi embedded board under a variety of different workloads. We compare the results with existing measurement equipment and analyze the advantages and shortcomings of our design.

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