Antonio De Caro

Energy efficiency has been a major challenge for exascale computing. Frequency scaling is a powerful technique to achieve energy savings in modern heterogeneous systems, and can be applied either at a coarse granularity, by application, or at a fine granularity, by setting the frequency for each computational kernel. The chosen granularity significantly impacts the performance and energy consumption of applications due to frequency-change overhead. We propose a novel phase-based method that minimizes the frequency-change overhead and improves performance and energy efficiency on heterogeneous multi-GPU systems. Our approach detects different phases through application profiling and DAG analysis, and sets an optimal frequency for each phase. Our methodology also considers MPI programs, where the overhead can be hidden by overlapping frequency-change with communication. Experimental results show up to 37% energy saving and 1.87x speedup for various benchmarks on a single GPU, and 68% energy saving and 3.63x speedup on two multi-GPU applications.

Cloud computing is a current trend in information technology and has become an important part of many industries. In the educational games field, cloud computing has the potential to revolutionize how educational games are created, delivered, and consumed.This research aims to contribute to a better understanding of how cloud computing can be integrated into the development of educational games and how developers can utilize its powerful tools to create games that are not only more engaging but also more effective in terms of learning outcomes and deployment speed. To address this issue, this thesis investigates the practicalities of integrating cloud computing with educational games using the fundamentals of ”Educational Serious Games as a Service” (ESGaaS) which highlight a set of characteristics that enable the execution of educational games in a cloud environment. This research takes into account the requirements of the ”Happy Heart” game in order to develop and evaluate such a model, as well as to identify an architecture that is compatible with the ESGaaS model and the quality criteria necessary for such an architecture. By applying a design science research method, we developed a prototype that addresses the needs of an ESGaaS-compliant architecture, and we evaluated it by highlighting the sensitivity points, risks, non-risks, and tradeoffs of such an architecture. This research has demonstrated that deploying educational games according to the characteristics of ”Educational Serious Games as a service” can solve some of the challenges of educational game development and lead to faster deployment of the game, improved learning outcomes, and easier assessment of student performance.