Introduction

This chapter introduces the energy consumption issue in modern computational multiprocessor platforms and describes the basic concept of Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). For ease of understanding and further discussions on multiprocessor platforms, important concepts related to energy-aware scheduling on uniprocessor platforms are also made clear first. For multiprocessor platforms, we mention that several new issues will also be considered besides the ones considered for uniprocessor platforms. The organization of the book is provided in the last paragraph.