On James Hamilton’s blog he mentions a power system workshop.

HotPower '09 Call for Papers

The HotPower ’09 workshop will be held on October 10^th at the same venue and right before the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2009) at Big Sky Resort Montana. Hotpower recognizes that power is becoming a central issue in the design of all systems from embedded systems to servers for high-scale data centers.

From http://hotpower09.stanford.edu/:

Power is increasingly becoming a central issue in designing systems, from embedded systems to data centers. We do not understand energy and its tradeoff with performance and other metrics very well. This limits our ability to further extend the performance envelope without violating physical constraints related to batteries, power, heat generation, or cooling.

HotPower hopes to provide a forum in which to present the latest research and to debate directions, challenges, and novel ideas about building energy-efficient computing systems. In addition, researchers coming to these issues from fields such as computer architecture, systems and networking, measurement and modeling, language and compiler design, and embedded systems will gain the opportunity to interact with and learn from one another.

This looks like interesting, and I may want to try writing a submission paper and attend the conference. Here is a list of topics the event had.

Topics

Topics of interest related to energy-efficient computing include but are not limited to:

Instrumentation, measurement, and measurement studies

Energy and performance profiling, accounting

Metrics, benchmarks, interfaces

Principles of power management

Performance, energy and other resource trade-offs, energy complexity

Compiler optimization, application design

System-level optimization, cross-layer coordination

Load and resource modeling, management

Scheduling, run-time adaptation, feedback control

Processor, network, storage, hardware components and architecture

Reliability and power management

Application to multi-core, data center, and embedded systems