pTop: A Process-level Power Profiling Tool

We solve the problem of estimating the amount of energy consumed by each application in the system by presenting the design and implementation of pTop, a simple and efficient process-level power profiling tool. Being a service of the operating system, pTop provides real-time information about the energy consumed by each process in terms of different resource components. pTop also supports a set of well-defined energy-aware application programming interfaces (API) helping the system and application developers build energy optimization policies. Different from hardware-based measurement tools, pTop is software-based, requires no additional hardware, and therefore, it is easy to apply in various platforms. Using pTop APIs, we developed an application adaptation scheme that extends the battery lifetime to meet certain time constraints. Experiment results showed that pTop is lightweight and easy to use.