SPAN: A software power analyzer for multicore computer systems

Understanding the power dissipation behavior of an application/workload is the key to writing power-efficient software and designing energy-efficient computer systems. Power modeling based on performance monitoring counters (PMCs) is an effective approach to analyze and quantify power dissipation behaviors on a real computer system. One of the potential benefits is that software developers are able to optimize the power behavior of an application by adjusting its source code implementations. However, it is challenging to relate power dissipation to the execution of specific segments of source code directly. In addition, existing power models need to be further investigated by reconsidering multicore architecture processors with on-chip shared resources. Therefore, we need to adjust PMC-based power models from the developers’ perspective, and reevaluate them on multicore computer systems. In this paper, followed by a detailed classification of previous efforts on power profiling, we propose a two-level powermodel that estimates per-core power dissipation on chipmultiprocessor (CMP) on-thefly by using only one PMC and frequency information from CPUs. The model attempts to satisfy the basic requirements from developer point of view: simplicity and applicability. Based on this model, we design and implement SPAN, a software power analyzer, to identify power behavior associatedwith source code. Given an application, SPAN is able to determine its power dissipation rate at the function-block level. We evaluate both the power model and SPAN on two general purpose multicore computer systems. The experimental results based on SPEC2008Cjvm benchmark suite show the average error rate of 5.40% across one core to six core validation. We also verify SPAN using the FT benchmark from NAS parallel benchmark suite and a synthetic workload. The overall estimated error of SPAN is under 3.00%. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.