Traditionally, the development of computing systems has been focused on performance improvements driven by the demand of applications from consumer, scientific and business domains. However, the ever increasing energy consumption of computing systems has started to limit further performance growth due to overwhelming electricity bills and carbon dioxide footprints. Therefore, the goal of the computer system design has been shifted to power and energy efficiency. To identify open challenges in the area and facilitate future advancements it is essential to synthesize and classify the research on power and energy-efficient design conducted to date. In this work we discuss causes and problems of high power / energy consumption, and present a taxonomy of energy-efficient design of computing systems covering the hardware, operating system, virtualization and data center levels. We survey various key works in the area and map them to our taxonomy to guide future design and development efforts. This chapter is concluded with a discussion of advancements identified in energy-efficient computing and our vision on future research directions.
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