APE: Metrics for understanding application performance efficiency under power caps

Abstract

As supercomputers continue to grow in size and power consumption, the ability to understand application run time performance and energy/power usage is of growing importance. In the future it may be necessary for systems to operate under power caps imposed by facilities due to external influences such as renewable power generation (e.g. solar) impacting energy availability at an affordable cost during certain times of day and more frequent natural disasters due to climate change causing power transmission disruptions. However, current energy consumption and power characterization metrics like energy-delay products do not express all of the characteristics of an application that are relevant to understanding the impact of power capping on performance.In this study, we (1) characterize the useful features of a metric that effectively captures time-to-solution and power performance dynamics; and (2) design and evaluate a novel set of application power efficiency (APE) metrics that accounts for time-to-completion, power utilization and power variability. Power utilization quantifies a system’s trapped capacity (unused power budget) and power variability quantifies an application’s variation of power consumption over time. We demonstrate how APE can be used to quantify application characteristics which, in turn, enables reasoning about the impacts of power capping on an application.