CENS Technical Seminar Series

Accurate Energy Attribution and Accounting for Multi-core Systems

Invited Speaker: Sebi Ryffel and Thanos Stathopoulos
Date: February 6, 2009
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: Boelter Hall 4760

Abstract

We present a novel energy attribution and accounting architecture for multi-core systems that can provide accurate, per-process energy information of individual hardware components. We introduce a hardware-assisted direct energy measurement system that integrates seamlessly with the host platform and provides detailed energy information of multiple hardware elements at microsecond-scale time resolution. We also introduce a performance counter based behavioral model that provides indirect information on the proportional energy consumption of concurrently executing processes in the system. We fuse the direct and indirect measurement information into a low-overhead kernel-based energy apportion and accounting software system that provides unprecedented visibility of per-process CPU and RAM energy consumption information on multi-core systems. Through experimentation we show that our energy apportioning system achieves an accuracy of at least 96% while impacting CPU performance by less than 0.6%.

Biography

Sebi Ryffel is a MS student in Electrical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. His main interests are operating system concepts and computer architectures. In January 2008 he came as a visiting scholar to UCLA and joined Professor William J. Kaiser's ASCENT Lab, where he worked together with Dr. Thanos Stathopoulos on energy-aware computing projects. The system presented in this CENS Seminar constitutes his master thesis.