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A Comparative Study of Methods for Measurement of Energy of Computing

2019-06-10, Fahad, Muhammad, Shahid, Arsalan, Manumachu, Ravi, Lastovetsky, Alexey

Energy of computing is a serious environmental concern and mitigating it is an important technological challenge. Accurate measurement of energy consumption during an application execution is key to application-level energy minimization techniques. There are three popular approaches to providing it: (a) System-level physical measurements using external power meters; (b) Measurements using on-chip power sensors and (c) Energy predictive models. In this work, we present a comprehensive study comparing the accuracy of state-of-the-art on-chip power sensors and energy predictive models against system-level physical measurements using external power meters, which we consider to be the ground truth. We show that the average error of the dynamic energy profiles obtained using on-chip power sensors can be as high as 73% and the maximum reaches 300% for two scientific applications, matrix-matrix multiplication and 2D fast Fourier transform for a wide range of problem sizes. The applications are executed on three modern Intel multicore CPUs, two Nvidia GPUs and an Intel Xeon Phi accelerator. The average error of the energy predictive models employing performance monitoring counters (PMCs) as predictor variables can be as high as 32% and the maximum reaches 100% for a diverse set of seventeen benchmarks executed on two Intel multicore CPUs (one Haswell and the other Skylake). We also demonstrate that using inaccurate energy measurements provided by on-chip sensors for dynamic energy optimization can result in significant energy losses up to 84%. We show that, owing to the nature of the deviations of the energy measurements provided by on-chip sensors from the ground truth, calibration can not improve the accuracy of the on-chip sensors to an extent that can allow them to be used in optimization of applications for dynamic energy. Finally, we present the lessons learned, our recommendations for the use of on-chip sensors and energy predictive models and future directions.

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A Novel Statistical Learning-Based Methodology for Measuring the Goodness of Energy Profiles of Applications Executing on Multicore Computing Platforms

2020-08-01, Fahad, Muhammad, Shahid, Arsalan, Manumachu, Ravi, Lastovetsky, Alexey

Accurate energy profiles are essential to the optimization of parallel applications for energy through workload distribution. Since there are many model-based methods available for efficient construction of energy profiles, we need an approach to measure the goodness of the profiles compared with the ground-truth profile, which is usually built by a time-consuming but reliable method. Correlation coefficient and relative error are two such popular statistical approaches, but they assume that profiles be linear or at least very smooth functions of workload size. This assumption does not hold true in the multicore era. Due to the complex shapes of energy profiles of applications on modern multicore platforms, the statistical methods can often rank inaccurate energy profiles higher than more accurate ones and employing such profiles in the energy optimization loop of an application leads to significant energy losses (up to 54% in our case). In this work, we present the first method specifically designed for goodness measurement of energy profiles. First, it analyses the underlying energy consumption trend of each energy profile and removes the profiles that exhibit a trend different from that of the ground truth. Then, it ranks the remaining energy profiles using the Euclidean distances as a metric. We demonstrate that the proposed method is more accurate than the statistical approaches and can save a significant amount of energy.