22. A system to deploy opportunistic power management strategies to
manage energy, obtained from an intermittent source of power, based on an
expected value of energy available to the system and on energy costs associated
with data processing work and memory content control operations performed by the
system, the system comprising:
means for obtaining energy from the intermittent source of power;
means for determining the expected value of energy available to the system;
means for determining a work energy cost associated with working on a sequence of data processing work including collection of input data, computation of processed data associated with the input data, and communication of the processed data to another device through a network connection;
means for determining a checkpoint energy cost associated with writing the processed data to a memory storage device during a memory writing operation;
means for comparing the expected value of energy available and the work and checkpoint energy costs; and
means for selecting, based on the comparing, a power management strategy from among the opportunistic power management strategies including: continuing the sequence of data processing work, checkpointing in the memory storage device an incremental result of
the processed data, and
transitioning to a reduced-power consumption state while awaiting for
additional energy to be obtained.
23. The system of claim 22, further comprising means for maintaining a
reserve of energy for checkpointing fundamental work and suppressing
checkpointing until the expected value of energy available approaches an amount of
energy maintained as the reserve of energy.
24. The system of any of claims 22-23, further comprising:
means for identifying whether data is critical; and
in response to identifying data as being critical, means for checkpointing in the memory storage device the critical data so as to avoid data loss.
25. The system of any of claims 22-23, further comprising means for
selecting the power management strategy based on a threshold amount of stored
data.