Energy-aware software: Challenges, opportunities and strategies

Abstract

Energy consumption of computing systems has become a major concern. Constrained by cost, environmental concerns and policy, minimising the energy foot-print of computing systems is one of the primary goals of many initiatives.As we move towards exascale computing, energy constraints become very real and are a major driver in design decisions. The issue is also apparent at the scale of desk top machines, where many core and accelerator chips are common and offer a spectrum of opportunities for balancing energy and performance.Conventionally, approaches for reducing energy consumption have been either at the operational level (such as powering down all or part of systems) or at the hardware design level (such as utilising specialised low-energy components). In this paper, we are interested in a different approach; energy-aware software. By measuring the energy consumption of a computer application and understanding where the energy usage lies, may allow a change of the software to provide opportunities for energy savings.In order to understand the complexities of this approach, we specifically look at multithreaded algorithms and applications. By an evaluation of a benchmark suite on multiple architectures and multiple environments, we show how basic parameters, such as threading options, compilers and frequencies, can impact energy consumption. As such, we provide an overview of the challenges that face software developers in this regard. We then offer a view of the directions that need to be taken and possible strategies needed for building energy-aware software.