PHOENIX: A Software tool to measure power consumption and identify the power profiles of applications

Abstract

High Performance Computing (HPC) is used to achieve best of performance. However, we see that power and energy are both critical concerns in High performance computing applications. One of the biggest challenges in HPC is power efficiency. Power and energy consumption has to be minimized to reduce the cost without much change in the performance of the application. One basic requirement to achieve this power efficiency is to measure the power consumption of application runs. If we cannot identify the power profile of an application, improvising the power utilization becomes more challenging. Although, external electronic watt meters exist to perform the analysis, software techniques to detect the power usage have been found to be more convenient for dynamic runs of the application. Also, the use of external hardware implies extra costs. Additionally, power has to be supplied to the device for its operation. Previous efforts to develop such a system have involved the use of expensive and bulky hardware technology and software applications that are not very accurate. We propose a software tool named PHOENIX that measures the power consumption and identifies the power profiles of the applications. The results are validated using a hardware power meter. We use rodinia benchmark suite to verify our results. Our results show that we achieve an average of 88% accuracy when compared to hardware power meter.