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The challenge of balancing between power and performance is now well established. While research in this area is well underway, the ability to measure power and energy in situ has remained an obstacle. This problem is magnified in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC). To meet this challenge, a device called PowerInsight has been designed to accomplish component level power and energy instrumentation of commodity hardware. PowerInsight was designed by Penguin Computing, in close cooperation with Sandia National Laboratories, to further power and energy research in HPC and other areas. This paper documents the design and development of PowerInsight, hardware and software. Validation of the functionality of PowerInsight was done during design and development as well as experimentally after integrating the first PowerInsight devices into a commodity cluster. This paper only begins to show the wide range of impact this level of power and energy instrumentation can have on a range of architectural and application research and analysis topics. 1

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Abstract-Power has recently been recognized as one of the major obstacles in fielding a Peta-FLOPs class system. To reach Exa-FLOPs, the challenge will certainly be compounded. In this paper we will discuss a number of High Performance Computing power related topics. We first describe our implementation of a scalable power measurement framework that has enabled us to examine real power use (current draw). [Using this framework, samples were obtained at a per-node (socket) granularity, at frequencies of up to 100 samples per second.] Additionally, we describe how we applied this capability to implement power conserving measures on our Catamount Light Weight Kernel, where we achieved an 80% improvement. This ability has enabled us to quantify the amount of energy used by applications and to contrast application energy use between a Light Weight and General Purpose operating system. Finally, we show application energy use increases proportionally with the increase in run-time due to operating system noise. Areas of future interest will also be discussed.