The EH Model: Early Design Space Exploration of Intermittent Processor Architectures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Energy-harvesting devices—which operate solely on energy collected from their environment—have brought forth a new paradigm of intermittent computing. These devices succumb to frequent power outages that would cause conventional systems to be stuck in a perpetual loop of restarting computation and never making progress. Ensuring forward progress in an intermittent execution model requires saving state in nonvolatile memory (backup) and potentially re-executing from the last saved state upon a power loss (restore). The interplay between spending energy on useful processing and spending energy on these necessary overheads yield unexpected trade-offs. To facilitate early design space exploration, the field of intermittent computing requires better models for 1) generalizing and reasoning about these trade-offs and 2) helping architects and programmers in making early-stage design decisions. We propose the EH model, which characterizes an intermittent system's ability to maximize how much of its available energy is spent on useful processor execution. The model parametrizes the energy costs associated with intermittent execution to allow an intuitive understanding of how forward progress can change. We use the EH model to explore how forward progress is impacted with the frequency of backups and the energy cost of backups and restores. We validate the EH model with hardware measurements on an MSP430 and characterize its parameters via simulation. We also demonstrate how architects and programmers can use the model to explore the design space of intermittent processors, derive insights, and model new optimizations that are unique to intermittent processor architectures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".