The growing concern for energy efficiency in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector has prompted the exploration of resource management techniques. While hardware architectures, such as single-ISA asymmetric multicore processors (AMP), offer potential energy savings, there is still untapped potential for software optimizations. This paper aims to bridge this gap by investigating the scheduling of garbage collection (GC) activities on a heterogeneous architecture with both performance cores ("p-cores") and energy cores ("e-cores") to achieve energy savings. Our study focuses on the concurrent ZGC collector in the context of Java Virtual Machines (JVM), as the energy aspect is not well studied in the context of latency-sensitive Java workloads. By comparing the energy efficiency, performance, latency, and memory utilization of executing GC on p-cores versus e-cores, we present compelling findings. We demonstrate that scheduling GC work on e-cores overall leads to approximately 3% energy savings without performance and mean latency degradation while requiring no additional effort from developers. Overall energy reduction can increase to 5.3$\pm$0.0225% by tuning the number of e-cores (still not changing the program!). Our findings highlight the practicality and benefits of scheduling GC on e-cores, showcasing the potential for energy savings in heterogeneous architectures running Java workloads while meeting critical latency requirements. Our research contributes to the ongoing efforts toward achieving a more sustainable and efficient ICT sector.

翻译：信息与通信技术（ICT）领域对能效问题的日益关注推动了资源管理技术的研究。尽管单指令集非对称多核处理器（AMP）等硬件架构提供了潜在的能效优势，但软件优化仍存在未被充分挖掘的潜力。本文旨在通过研究在配备性能核心（p-cores）与能效核心（e-cores）的异构架构上调度垃圾回收（GC）活动以实现能耗节约，填补这一空白。我们聚焦于Java虚拟机（JVM）环境中的并发ZGC回收器，原因是其能效方面尚未在延迟敏感的Java工作负载背景下得到充分研究。通过对比在p-cores与e-cores上执行GC的能效、性能、延迟及内存利用率，我们得出了具有说服力的结论。研究表明，在e-cores上调度GC工作整体可节省约3%的能耗，且不导致性能与平均延迟退化，同时无需开发者额外投入。通过调整e-cores数量（且无需修改程序！），整体能耗降低可提升至5.3±0.0225%。我们的发现凸显了在e-cores上调度GC的实用性与优势，展示了在运行Java工作负载的异构架构中实现能耗节约并满足关键延迟要求的潜力。本研究为构建更可持续、更高效的ICT领域持续贡献力量。