A Comparison of High-Level Full-System Power Models

Dynamic power management in enterprise environments requires an understanding of the relationship between resource utilization and system-level power consumption. Power models based on resource utilization have been proposed in the context of enabling specific energy-efficiency optimizations on specific machines, but the accuracy and portability of different approaches to modeling have not been systematically compared. In this work, we use a common infrastructure to fit a family of high-level full-system power models, and we compare these models over a wide variation of workloads and machines, from a laptop to a server. This analysis shows that a model based on OS utilization metrics and CPU performance counters is generally most accurate across the machines and workloads tested. It is particularly useful for machines whose dynamic power consumption is not dominated by the CPU, as well as machines with aggressively power-managed CPUs, two classes of systems that are increasingly preva...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Suzanne Rivoire, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Christos Kozyrakis
• Keywords: Dynamic Power Consumption, Full-system Power Models, Operating System, OSDI 2008, System-level Power Consumption