Design of a Standard and Programmatically Accessible Interface for Smart Meters to Allow Monitoring Automation of the Energy Consumed by the Execution of Computer Software

Abstract

Software has become more computationally demanding nowadays, turning out high-performance software in many cases, implying higher energy and economic expenditure. Indeed, many studies have arisen within the IT community to mitigate the environmental impact of software. Collecting and measuring software’s power consumption has become an essential task. This paper proposes the design of a standard interface for any currently available smart meter, which is programmatically accessible from any software application and can collect consumption data transparently while a program is executed. This interface is structured into two layers. The former is a driver that provides an OS-level standard interface to the meter, while the latter is a proxy offering higher-level API for a concrete programming language. This design provides many benefits. It makes it possible to substitute the meter for a different device without affecting the proxy layer. It also allows the presence of multiple proxy implementations to offer a programmatic interface to the meter for several languages. A prototype of the proposed interface design has been implemented for a concrete smart meter and OS to demonstrate its feasibility. It has been tested with two experiments. Firstly, its correct functioning has been validated. Later, the prototype has been applied to monitor the execution of a high-performance program, a machine learning application to select the most relevant features of electroencephalogram data.