A Protocol to Assess the Accuracy of Process-Level Power Models

by Emile Cadorel and Dimitri Saingre
24/10/2024
DiverSE Coffee
Rennes, France

Abstract

The energy consumption of servers has been a critical research area, drawing significant interest from academic and industrial sectors. Various models have been developed to estimate power consumption of computing devices, ranging from simple linear models to more complex ones. In recent years, as the cloud paradigm has expanded and allowed applications to be hosted alongside others in virtual machines, power models have evolved to distribute energy usage among applications on a server. These models aim to achieve two primary objectives: monitoring the energy footprint and optimizing energy consumption. Nonetheless, little attention has been given in academic literature to evaluate the efficiency and accuracy of the allocation phase of this models. This paper presents a definition of power division and a protocol to evaluate models using such division. The proposed protocol is used to evaluate models on physical machines with different performance settings, toggling hyperthreading and turboboost. Before discussing the conceptual distinctions between power and energy allocation models, our results show the existence of some limitations in the existing models. These results provide valuable insight into the missing information needed to improve the accuracy of power models.