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08.
06.
2012
Measuring Energy Consumption for Short Code Paths Using RAPL
Marcus Hähnel
TU Dresden
Measuring the energy consumption of software components is a major building
block for generating models that allow for energy-aware scheduling, accounting
and budgeting. Current measurement techniques focus on coarse-grained
measurements of application or system events. However, fine grain adjustments
in particular in the operating-system kernel and in application-level servers
require power profiles at the level of a single software function. Until
recently, this appeared to be impossible due to the lacking fine grain
resolution and high costs of measurement equipment.
In this talk I present our experience in using the Running Average Power
Limit (RAPL) energy sensors available in recent Intel CPUs for measuring energy
consumption of short code paths. We investigated the granularity at which RAPL
measurements can be performed and discuss practical obstacles that occur when
performing these measurements on complex modern CPUs. Furthermore,
we demonstrated how to use the RAPL infrastructure to characterize the
energy costs for decoding video slices.
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