Modeling System-Level Power Consumption Profiles Using RAPL

Abstract

Efficient power management is essential in ensuring the economic viability of large-scale distributed systems. There is growing interest in applying the Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) feature that is commonly found in today's Intel CPUs to energy monitoring and efficiency applications. We investigate the power consumption characteristics of two different CPUs using the RAPL feature. We present a prototype lightweight software-based virtual power meter that exploits this functionality. Utilizing a simple but very effective application-agnostic power model, it offers comparable or superior performance to existing power models that are more complex. It is portable across a variety of systems. It can be used in containerized or virtualized environments. We demonstrate that our power model has an average error of 1.63 %. This result compares favorably with existing state-of-the-art power models and is achieved using a simple power model. Consequently, our power meter is viable for use in real-world applications such as power estimation for energy-aware scheduling.