Assessing Power Monitoring Approaches for Energy and Power Analysis of Computers

Abstract

Large-scale distributed systems (e.g., datacenters, HPC systems, clouds, large-scale networks, etc.) consume and will consume enormous amounts of energy. Therefore, accurately monitoring the power dissipation and energy consumption of these systems is more unavoidable. The main novelty of this contribution is the analysis and evaluation of different external and internal power monitoring devices tested using two different computing systems, a server and a desktop machine. Furthermore, we provide experimental results for a variety of benchmarks which intensively exercise the main components (CPU, Memory, HDDs, and NICs) of the target platforms to validate the accuracy of the equipment in terms of power dissipation and energy consumption. On the other hand, we also evaluate three different power measurement interfaces available on current architecture generations. Thanks to the high sampling rate and to the different measured lines, the internal wattmeters allow an improved visualization of some power fluctuations. However, a high sampling rate is not always necessary to understand the evolution of the power consumption during the execution of a benchmark.

Evaluating the performance and energy efficiency of the COSMO-ART model system

“…Diouri et al [12] present a deep study of different internal and external power monitoring devices that are widely used nowadays.…”

Investigating the effect of design patterns on energy consumption

“…Therefore, we prioritized a finer‐grained technique over a more precise one. In addition, selecting and configuring a hardware measurement tool may represent a complex and expensive task, which if not accurately performed can introduce additional bias. To select the appropriate tools, we searched the literature and identified 9 software tools for measuring energy consumption.…”

Preparing HPC Applications for Exascale: Challenges and Recommendations

“…Further work will strongly benefit from these results. Different power measurement interfaces available on current architecture generations have been evaluated and the role of the sampling rate has been discussed [29].…”