The Illinois GRACE Project: Global Resource Adaptation through CoopEration

Mobile systems primarily processing multimedia data are ex- pected to become a dominant computing platform for a variety of application domains. The design of such systems imposes several new challenges, as it must consider demanding, dy- namic, and multidimensional resource requirements and con- straints, with energy becoming a first-class resource. At th e same time, the ability of multimedia applications to trade off output quality for system resources and the difference between their peak and average demands offers a huge opportunity for optimization. A promising approach to meeting the challenges of these sys- tems, therefore, is to design all system layers with an abili ty to adapt in response to system or application changes. Fur- ther, to reap the full benefits of these adaptations, all syst em layers must cooperate to reach a system-wide globally opti- mal configuration. This paper describes the Illinois GRACE - Global Resource Adaptation through CoopEration - project, where our goal is to develop an integrated cross-layer adaptive system where hardware and all software layers cooperatively adapt to changing system resources and application demands, seeking to maximize user satisfaction while meeting resource constraints of energy, time, and bandwidth.