Server power measured per programme

Aiming to cut power waste in data centres, Fujitsu Labs has developed a way to determine how much energy each programme running on a CPU consumes.

It adds to the capability, called RAPL, of some Intel CPUs to measure overall power consumption.

“According to a report by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan’s datacenters consume an average of 7.72 billion kWh per year,” said Fujitsu. “One way to reduce energy consumption is through the use of more energy-efficient hardware. Another is to reduce the energy required to run programs on servers. A precondition for energy-efficient programming is to have an understanding of the energy being consumed by existing software. Until now, however, it was not possible to calculate the energy required to execute software on a core-by-core basis, so it has been difficult to take a software-based approach to reducing power consumption.”

Not a lot of detail has been revealed – it is to be presented at the Summer United Workshops on Parallel, Distributed and Cooperative Processing 2015 (SWoPP 2015) next week.

The Lab’s technique uses information that can be tracked at the individual core level such as clock cycles and cache-hit percentages to estimate energy consumption in detail, down to the program module level. It adds atound 1% processing over-head, and captures information by the millisecond.

Testing is underway, a practical implementation is expected in 2016, and the company is also looking into applying the technology to its own data centres.

 

steve bush

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via Yuichun