Fast Energy Estimation Through Partial Execution of HPC Applications

In order to optimize the energy use of servers in Data Centers, techniques such as power capping or power budgeting are usually deployed. These techniques rely on the prediction of the power and execution time of applications. These data are obtained via dynamic profiling which requires a full execution of the application. This is not feasible in High Performance Computing (HPC) applications with long execution times. In this paper, we present a methodology to estimate the dynamic CPU and memory energy consumption of an application without executing it completely. Our methodology merges static code analysis information and dynamic profiling via the partial execution of the application. We do so by leveraging the concept of application signature, defined as a reduced version of the application in terms of execution time and power profile. We validate our methodology with a set of CPU-intensive, memory-intensive benchmarks and multi-threaded applications in a presently shipping enterprise server. Our energy estimation methodology shows an overall error below 8.0% when compared to the dynamic energy of the whole execution of the application. Also, our energy estimation methodology allows to estimate the energy of multi-threaded applications with an RMSE equal to 12.7% when compared to the dynamic energy from the complete parallel execution.