4th Workshop on Energy Secure System Architectures (ESSA)

The "power wall" has forced chip and system architects to design with smaller margins between nominal and worst-case operating points. Dynamic power and thermal management control loops have already become an integral part of chip and system design. New research papers in wearout and general reliability management have recently been published. These new generation management protocols have, however, opened up other sources of concern: e.g. control loop stability and robustness of the management protocols. The potential security holes exposed by the integrated control loops and system safety issues triggered by potential violations of power or thermal limits are other areas of concern. We seek to motivate the research community into adopting a holistic approach to mitigating the power wall and the concomitant reliability-security wall. We have coined the term "Energy-Secure System Architectures" to cover the range of research being pursued within industry and academia in order to ensure robust and secure functionality, while meeting the energy-related constraints of the emerging "green computing" era. This segmented workshop offering, composed of lectures provided by experts in the areas of power/thermal management, reliability and security, provides a comprehensive view of the hardware and software aspects of Energy-Secure System Architectures. This is the fourth year of the offering of this workshop.