Efficient Program Power Behavior Characterization

Fine-grained program power behavior is useful in both evaluating power optimizations and observing power optimization opportunities. Detailed power simulation is time consuming and often inaccurate. Physical power measurement is faster and objective. However, fine-grained measurement generates enormous amounts of data in which locating important features is difficult, while coarse-grained measurement sacrifices important detail. We present a program power behavior characterization infrastructure that identifies program phases, selects a representative interval of execution for each phase, and instruments the program to enable precise power measurement of these intervals to get their time-dependent power behavior. We show that the representative intervals accurately model the fine-grained time-dependent behavior of the program. They also accurately estimate the total energy of a program. Our compiler infrastructure allows for easy mapping between a measurement result and its correspondi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: HIPEAC
• Authors: Chunling Hu, Daniel A. Jiménez, Ulrich Kremer
• Keywords: Basic Block Vectors, HIPEAC 2007, Power Measurement, Program Power Behavior, System Software