Measuring Energy Consumption for Short Code Paths Using RAPL

Date

Jun 8, 2012

Time

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Speaker

Marcus Hähnel

Affiliation

TU Dresden

Language

en

Main Topic

Informatik

Other Topics

Informatik

Description

Measuring the energy consumption of software components is a major building block for generating models that allow for energy-aware scheduling, accounting and budgeting. Current measurement techniques focus on coarse-grained measurements of application or system events. However, fine grain adjustments in particular in the operating-system kernel and in application-level servers require power profiles at the level of a single software function. Until recently, this appeared to be impossible due to the lacking fine grain resolution and high costs of measurement equipment. In this talk I present our experience in using the Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) energy sensors available in recent Intel CPUs for measuring energy consumption of short code paths. We investigated the granularity at which RAPL measurements can be performed and discuss practical obstacles that occur when performing these measurements on complex modern CPUs. Furthermore, we demonstrated how to use the RAPL infrastructure to characterize the energy costs for decoding video slices.

Last modified: Jun 8, 2012, 9:37:31 AM