Topics on measuring real power usage on high performance computing platforms

Abstract

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.

Application power profiling on IBM Blue Gene/Q

“…These studies however focus on evaluating power consumption of individual hardware components and neglect to consider the system as a whole [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23].…”

High performance systems: An agent based application power profiling

“…They also explained the real time power measurements on a single node and multi-node systems. James et al [15] explained about measuring real power usage on High Performance Computing platforms and they described about the implementation of scalable power measurement framework that has enabled to examine real power use. R. Ge et al [1] explained the power measurement tutorial for Green500 list and the measurement procedure for the single node compute system.…”

Efficient resource management for Cloud computing environments

“…The second fastest Supercomputer is Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. While Jaguar too has a number of power saving features developed by Sandia, Oak Ridge and Cray [24] such as advanced power metering at the CPU level, 480 volt power supplies, and an advanced cooling system developed by Cray, the system as a whole still consumes almost 7 Megawatts of power. [20] One technique being explored is the use of Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) within Clusters and Supercomputers [25], [26].…”