Battery-powered distributed systems (extended abstract)

Mobile personal computers will be a vital technology for making electronic information processing available to people on the move. We expect personal mobile computers, 'mobile digital companions', to be small enough that they can be carried along all day, versatile enough that they can be used for all kinds of information processing -- diary, notebook, pager, telephone, walk man, dictation, e-mail, e-money, keys, ID -- and frugal enough that they can be used all day without recharging. This paper reports ongoing work on Moby Dick, a research project that addresses fundamental issues in the architecture, design and implementation of lowpower hand-held computers, with particular emphases on energy conservation and security. The goal is to investigate architectural issues in hardware and software design in concert, so that opportunities in hardware design can be exploited by supportive software.